Job Specifications
About Us
NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025 and 2026.
We operate two core products:
NALA, our consumer app making cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia
Rafiki, our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments
Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp — operators who've scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.
At NALA, this isn't just a job. It's ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.
Join us in building Payments for the Next Billion!
Your Mission
Collections & Treasury is the squad building a new collections product and the financial backbone other parts of the business will stand on.
This includes things like:
Building the infrastructure to spin up vIBANs on demand
Designing customer-facing APIs to collect money through different payment strategies
Handling the real-world challenge of collections across the African continent (this is not simply credit cards, for example STK)
This is not just another product squad. We are building the financial backbone that other things will stand on.
We need a strong Senior / Lead Engineer (ideally with financial systems experience) who can take ownership of figuring out the right ways to build a robust Collections & Treasury foundation that can scale with us.
Your Responsibilities In This Role
Own key architecture and implementation decisions for the collections & treasury foundation
Lead design work (RFCs, diagrams, API and system specs) to align on solutions before building
Partner with PMs and stakeholders to translate business intent into technically sound requirements
Design and build customer-facing and internal APIs to support collections and payment strategies
Build reliable infrastructure for vIBAN provisioning and collections orchestration
Drive engineering quality across API standards, testing strategy, code review bar, and maintainability
Manage delivery by breaking down complex work, sequencing milestones, and keeping projects moving end to end
Make pragmatic trade-offs: move fast where we can, protect correctness where we must (especially in financial systems)
What this role is not
To set you up for success, we want to be explicit about how engineering works here:
We build depth before breadth. Engineers typically start by embedding deeply in a product squad, learning the domain, how we operate as a business, and earning trust through delivery. Broader, cross-cutting impact follows from that foundation
This is a high-pace, VC-backed environment. Priorities can shift quickly and ambiguity is normal. We are looking for people who stay calm, make good calls with imperfect information, and keep momentum
Ownership includes alignment. We expect engineers to drive work end to end and collaborate with other engineers, follow chapter standards, and bring others along, so solutions scale beyond one person
Collaboration is part of the craft. We value consultation, design reviews, and feedback loops because they help us build better systems and avoid rework. We value autonomy, but not lone-wolf engineering
Must-have requirements
Knowledge
How to translate business intent into technical requirements and clean system boundaries
What "good" looks like in financial-grade systems, including correctness, reliability, auditability, and operational readiness
Design principles that drive maintainability (single responsibility, separation of concerns, etc.)
API fundamentals, including consistency, versioning, backward compatibility, and developer experience
Skills
Requirement gathering
You do not just take tickets and build
You quiz PMs, challenge stakeholders, and push on solutions that do not make sense
You do not accept proposals from non-technical people at face value, you turn business intent into something technically sound
Design-first (this is a must)
You are not someone who "thinks by coding"
You draw diagrams, write RFCs, explore hypotheses, and visualise systems at a high level
Freestyling into implementation without alignment is not your style
Engineering quality
You care about good API design and reusability
You write unit-testable code and advocate for quality during code reviews
Especially in financial systems, "it works" is not the bar
Disciplined execution
You can own complex projects end to end
You avoid excessive context switching and push back when too many parallel things risk delaying delivery
You care about finishing work properly, not just "mostly done"
Experience
Proven delivery of complex backend or distributed systems in a production environment
Experience owning