Backend Engineer, Payments Platform

Ziina Ltd; Dubai; On-site; AED 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Ziina Ltd is seeking a Backend Engineer to build and scale backend services that power financial features for users. You will own features end-to-end, from design through deployment, monitoring and iteration, collaborating with product, design, and operations teams.

The role emphasizes clean, maintainable code, data-driven decisions, and strong communication to shape a growing engineering organization. Ideal candidates are owners who can move quickly, articulate trade-offs, and relocate to the

Qualifications

• Own and ship end-to-end backend features with reliability and scalability.
• Be able to articulate technical and design requirements clearly.
• Write clean, well-documented, testable code.
• Strong data-driven thinking and customer focus.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Willing to relocate to the UAE.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product, design, operations, and engineering to deliver high-value features.
• Own features from design to shipping, including monitoring and measurement.
• Design and build a cloud-native platform with monitoring, security, and scalability.
• Improve CI/CD workflows to reduce time-to-market.
• Shape engineering culture through knowledge-sharing practices.

Skills

Owner mindset

Curious

Define requirements

Clean code

Data-driven thinking

Excellent communication

Willing to relocate to UAE

Tools

Node.js

GraphQL

Postgres

ElasticSearch

Kafka

React

Redis

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Ziina is looking for a Backend 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 Backend 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 and ship end-to-end reliable, scalable, and maintainable software that will keep our users’ funds safe and stand the test of time. You will take features from design, to implementation, to polish, to shipping, to monitoring and measuring progress

• Design and build a cloud-native platform while leveraging the main features for monitoring, observability, security, scalability, elasticity, and testing

• Improve CI/CD workflows to reduce time-to-market for new features

• 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

• 3+ years developing software

• Experience working on systems that handle money

• Experience with Node.js, GraphQL, Postgres, ElasticSearch, or Kafka

• Experience shipping and maintaining complex backends

Our tech stack

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

• Typescript, Node.js and Nest.js for our main application’s backend

• Swift/SwiftUI for our iOS app, Kotlin for our Android app

• Next.js, React and Typescript for our web applications

• GraphQL Federation for our client-facing APIs and Kafka for our inter-service communication

• PostgresSQL for consistent and durable storage, Redis for quick fetching, Elasticsearch for quick searching

• AWS for hosting our cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes for orchestrating our workloads

• Terraform for IaC

• Github Actions for CI/CD