Senior Backend Engineer, Collections and Treasury

Nalamoney; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

NALA in London is hiring a Senior/Lead Engineer to own the architecture of our Collections & Treasury backbone, building the foundations for on-demand vIBANs and diverse payment strategies. You will lead design work (RFCs, diagrams, API specs), translate business intent into technical requirements, and collaborate with PMs and stakeholders.

This role requires ownership, high-velocity delivery, and readiness to join the on-call rota; join a VC-backed, fast-growing fintech redefining cross-border

Qualifications

• This role requires a Senior/Lead Engineer with financial systems experience.
• Design and own architecture for collections & treasury foundations.
• Lead design work (RFCs, diagrams, API specs) before building.

Responsibilities

• Own key architecture and implementation decisions for collections & treasury
• Lead design work (RFCs, diagrams, API and system specs)
• Partner with PMs and stakeholders to translate business intent into technical 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, and maintainability
• Manage delivery by breaking down complex work, sequencing milestones, and keeping projects moving end to end
• Join our on-call rota once a month for 1 week (fully compensated + post-onboarding)

Skills

Senior/Lead Engineer

Financial systems experience

API design

Architectural design

On-call readiness

Tools

RFCs

Diagrams

APIs

Job description

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 for global giants like MoneyGram & Western Union.

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)


• Join our on-call rota once a month for 1 week (This will be fully compensated + post-onboarding)

Read this before you apply

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