Senior Backend Engineer

Tala was named one of the top 50 FinTech companies in the world. We are a financial technology company on a mission to make financial services simple, inclusive, and accessible for the doers and dreamers globally. More than 5 million people in emerging markets have borrowed through our smartphone app, which provides instant credit scoring, lending, education, and other personalized financial services. Headquartered in Santa Monica, we support the needs of our customers in Kenya, Mexico, Philippines, and India. 
The Senior Backend Engineer builds and extends Tala’s backend architecture to support new country launches, new features, and fast growing user base. As a technologist and a leader, the Senior Backend Engineer pushes the team towards building a highly available, scalable, reliable, fault tolerant, and performant microservices platform. The Senior Backend Engineer follows and improves upon Tala’s engineering processes and standards while advancing Tala’s mission and business objectives. This is a technical leadership role within Tala’s technical track. You will report to the Backend Engineering Manager and collaborate cross-functionally with all Tala teams across the globe.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement features as defined in the Product roadmap
• Review design documents, perform code reviews, and weigh in on implementation choices from other technical teams
• Collaborate and support with cross functional teams (Product, Data, Credit, and Business Development) to ship scalable software solutions
• Continually improve our codebase with clean and efficient code as well as solving problems using the most appropriate technology
• Contribute to complete migration of legacy codebase to microservices architecture
• Contribute to the testing infrastructure to increase code coverage for backend modules
• Advance monitoring and alerting capabilities of backend modules to allow proactive improvements to availability and response times 
• Technically lead and mentor a team of Backend Engineers to build/extend complex modules

Requirements

• 4+ years of backend software engineering experience
• 4+ years coding in one or more of the following languages: Java, Scala, Kotlin
• Developed and launched large scale consumer applications with the backend on Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure) using microservices architecture paradigm
• Expert knowledge in REST API design and development for mobile/web use
• Expert proficiency in Agile development process
• Excellent ability to prioritize and communicate in a fast-paced environment
• Strong relational database experience (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL)
• Strong non-relational database experience (Cassandra, Redshift, DynamoDB, HDFS)
• BS degree in Computer Science or related fields is a plus
• Demonstrated ability to interview candidates and evaluate technical skills

About Tala
Our vision is to build a new financial ecosystem where everyone can participate on equal footing and access the tools they need to be financially healthy. We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse global team that represents a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and experience. We hire talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.