Engineering Manager

Job Description

💙 Our mission

At NALA, we're building payments for the Next Billion. This means transforming how money moves into Africa, Asia and beyond. By building cutting-edge payment solutions, we’re simplifying financial transactions for individuals and businesses alike—helping them thrive in a global economy.

We’re driven by innovation, community, and the belief that everyone deserves access to reliable, efficient, and affordable financial services. If you’re passionate about creating meaningful change and shaping the future of fintech in Africa and Asia, join us and be part of a team that's revolutionising financial empowerment on a global scale.

🎯 Your responsibilities in this role

At NALA, our team, as well as our product, is scaling up rapidly. Within the 2 years, our team has grown by nearly 250%, and as we start to expand our product, we focus on building new revenue lines. This will be to join one of our squads either on the NALA (B2C) or Rafiki (B2B) squads. You'll be responsible for supporting and developing a cross-functional squad of Engineers whilst collaborating with the Product Managers.

• Work closely with engineers to architect and develop the best technical design and approach
• Be a key technical contributor to the team by this, we mean, please expect to get your hands dirty with coding as you build high-quality products for NALA
• Manage the day-to-day activities of the engineering team within an Agile/Scrum environment
• Help individuals reach their professional goals through coaching and regular 1:1s and mentor them on right training courses, conferences, and potential stretch projects to pave the way for career progression
• Develop a high-performing engineering team by managing performance and providing constructive feedback regularly to the team
• Build a strong team and provide support in hiring new engineers to the team
• Report status of development, quality, operations, and system performance to management regularly
• The approximate role split:
• 20% Direct line management (approx 5-6 reports)
• 60% Building engineering culture/processes, managing work with other EMs and Product
• 20% Hands-on ie System design/writing code

⚒️ Our Tech Stack

• Services are written in Go, deployed in AWS ECS and communicate with our app with gRPC
• Our app is written in Dart with Flutter and available on both Android and iOS
• Our back-office / and Rafiki's customer facing web app is written in Typescript/React
• We use Postgres, kafka, redis and vault
• We use and leverage AWS as much as possible and we manage it with Terraform
• We write unit and integration tests, do code reviews and deploy multiple times a day
• We use Agile frameworks and also use Jira to manage

🔥 Must have job requirements

• Have 8+ years of Engineering experience with at least 2 years experience managing high-performing engineers
• Empathetic leadership style and care deeply about helping others achieve their goals
• Have hands-on experience with Go
• Experience in building complex, scalable, and high-performance products, taking them from idea inception stage through to full development life cycle
• You have experience working asynchronously with global teams using tools like Slack/Teams/Jira as well as other modern communication systems
• Strong time management skills and ability to work on concurrent assignments with different priorities
• Proven results-oriented person with a strong business and technical vision
• Passionate about our product and the mission that we are on
• Fluent in written and spoken English

💪 Nice to have job requirements

• You have experience working in Fintech and Payments
• You have experience working in a tech startup
• Experience in infosec
• Experience in creating robust, well-polished and documented server-to-server APIs for customers access (E.g. REST/GraphQL)

➡️ Interview Process

If successful you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 stages:

• [30mins] Interview with the Talent Team
• This is our initial touchpoint. We're keen to understand your motivations and experiences better. As a tip, reflecting on why you applied for this role and being familiar with your application responses will be beneficial.
• [1 hour] Coding Challenge
• You’ll complete a pair programming exercise live, with two of our engineers.
• [1.5 hour] Architecture Interview
• You’ll solve an architecture challenge with two of our Engineering Managers. As well some behavioural questions on how you manage a team.
• [30 mins] Interview with the CTO or Hiring Manager
• The final interview will involve speaking with the CTO about your motivation for the role and will be a great opportunity to ask any questions you have about the business.
• References
• We conduct reference checks as standard for all of our hires at NALA.
• Decision
• We’ll aim to come back to you with a timely decision and feedback on your overall interview process.

⭐️ Benefits

UK / EU / Remote, we have the following benefits:

• 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore.
• Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month.
• Enhanced Parental Leave - We offer 16 weeks of full pay for the primary caregiver and 4 weeks of full pay for the secondary caregiver (After a 6-month probationary period)
• Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
• Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.

For people who come to our London office;

• Hybrid Working: We work in our Canary Wharf Office three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday).
• Sarabi: Themed snacks and Friday lunch focused on building great working relationships with the team.
• Monthly Socials: Join fun social events every month for great times.
• Free Coffee: Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.