Messaging Platform Tech Lead — Scale & Orchestrate

Watu; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Watu is seeking a Tech Lead for Messaging Experience Engineering to own architectural direction, delivery quality, and partner governance for high-volume messaging across SMS and WhatsApp. You will shape conversational flows, mentor engineers, and ensure robust, scalable delivery in a fintech environment.

You will co-own sprint planning with the Product Owner, oversee PR reviews, and drive cross-market architectural decisions.

Qualifications

• Experience building conversational product systems using WhatsApp Business API or similar.
• Strong hands-on experience with one or several backend languages (Java, Python, Node.js, …).
• Understanding of event-driven messaging systems: Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent at production scale.

Responsibilities

• Own the messaging dispatch layer across SMS, WhatsApp, and FCM with high volume and low latency.
• Own the conversational orchestration engine and in-house business rules.
• Govern the Infobip integration; ensure flow logic remains in Watu systems.
• Own delivery reliability, tracking, retries, failure handling, and observability.
• Design for scale across multiple markets with different carrier characteristics.

Skills

WhatsApp API

Backend Java/Python/Node

Event-driven architecture

SMS gateway

Conversations design

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

Watu is seeking a Tech Lead for Messaging Experience Engineering to own architectural direction, delivery quality, and partner governance for high-volume messaging across SMS and WhatsApp. You will shape conversational flows, mentor engineers, and ensure robust, scalable delivery in a fintech environment.

You will co-own sprint planning with the Product Owner, oversee PR reviews, and drive cross-market architectural decisions.