Senior DevOps Engineer

About Ziina

Ziina’s mission is to bring financial freedom to every person in the Middle East. We are building MENA’s consumer financial platform, starting with a peer-to-peer wallet.

Our team have backgrounds from Apple, Uber, Oracle, Coinbase, Stanford, Bain, Careem, and Yandex. We've seen exciting traction since our launch in 2020, and we have over 22,000 users registered on the waiting list for our app, which we’ve just recently launched. We have won 8 international UX/UI design awards.

Our latest funding round included Avenir Growth, Goodwater Capital, ANIM, the Oman Tech Fund, Class 5 Global, Long Journey Ventures, Graph Ventures, Jabbar Internet Group, Wamda, and FJ Labs. We also have a number of angel investors consisting of early employees and executives at the top technology companies globally who advise our team, including:

• Guillaume Pousaz, CEO of Checkout.com
• Dan Becker, Head of Product Design at Instagram
• Dan Westgarth, COO of Deel
• Adam Fishman, former Head of Growth at Lyft and former VP of Growth at Patreon
• Praveen Murugesan, former Director of Engineering at Uber and current VP of Engineering at Project44

Ziina is also proud to be backed by Y Combinator.

See here for more on the team, the product, and the company culture.

Job Description

Ziina is looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to join our team. We laid a strong foundation upon which we’ve shipped our product. We are looking for someone to help us build out innovative new features, prepare our technology to scale, and help shape our engineering organization to be the kind of place that bright minds from across the region and the world aspire to work for.

As our team is small, our ideal candidate is a creative thinker excited to solve hard problems and to build something from the ground up. They can move quickly, clearly articulate tradeoffs, and have the judgement to own features independently. They are obsessive about delivering great, high quality products to our users. We are ambitious and excited to build big things, and we’d love to bring on someone who is as well. In short, we are looking for owners.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer at Ziina you will:

• Collaborate with world-class product, design, operations, and engineering teams to determine which features and solutions will deliver the most value for the business and the best experience for our users.
• Own, build and operate end-to-end reliable, scalable, and maintainable platform that will keep our applications scalable, stable, secure and highly-available. You will take features from design, to implementation, to polish, to shipping, to monitoring and measuring progress.
• Improve CI/CD workflows to reduce time-to-market for new features.
• Review code and mentor other engineers on the team.
• Help shape our engineering culture by introducing good practices and methods of knowledge-sharing.

Key skills and characteristics

• Be an owner and a team player.
• Be curious and eager to grow.
• Be able to define and effectively communicate technical and design requirements.
• Be able to write clean, high-quality, testable, reusable, and well-documented code.
• Possess strong data-driven thinking and customer focus.
• Possess excellent communication skills and a desire to collaborate.
• Live in, or be willing to relocate to the UAE.

What would amaze us

• 5+ years of DevOps/SRE experience.
• Substantial experience with a popular CSP (GCP, AWS, Azure), Database Management, Containerization and IaC frameworks.
• Substantial experience building and operating complex, distributed and highly available platforms.
• Substantial experience running, supporting and managing infrastructures and platforms including security, networks, containerization, automation, monitoring, etc.
• Experience working on transactional and event based systems.
• Experience being a part of on-call rosters, especially those involving incident response.

Our Perks

• Pretty Sweet Package: We offer an above-market compensation package in the form of a base salary plus equity. Since income tax is 0% in Dubai you get to keep every penny (or fil).
• Golden Visa: The Golden Visa system allows foreign nationals to live, work, and conduct business in the UAE without requiring a national sponsor. The visas will be issued for 10 years and will automatically be renewed.
• Flexible Work: Our team is all based in Dubai, but hours at Ziina are flexible and employees are encouraged to work whenever and wherever they feel most comfortable.
• Vacation Policy: Ziina has an unlimited vacation policy, which means that we don’t limit the number of days you take or track them. We want you to take enough time away to come back recharged and ready to do your best work.
• Insurance: We offer competitive medical, dental and vision insurance for employees and dependents through our provider, Allianz.
• Paid Parental Leave: We offer parents paid time off to spend quality time with family.
• Office Hours: We’ve set up recurring office hours with early employees and executives at the top technology companies globally to advise us across company functions: engineering, product, design, and growth (see above for some of our advisors).
• Educational Stipend: We cover the costs of whatever courses, books, or programs any team member chooses to take in pursuit of leveling up.

Our Tech Stack

We’ve built a modular architecture with the principles of reliability, scalability, and maintainability in mind. Our current stack is:

• Typescript and Node.js (our main application’s backend)
• Swift (for our iOS app), Kotlin (for our Android app), and React (for our web apps)
• GraphQL Federation (for our client-facing APIs) and Kafka (for our inter-service communication)
• Postgres (for consistent and durable storage), Redis (for quick fetching), Elasticsearch (for quick searching)
• Google Cloud Platform (for hosting our cloud infra) and Kubernetes (for managing our server instances)
• GitHub Actions (for CI/CD)