Lead Engineer

Summary

Join Rafiki, a rapidly growing fintech company building Africa’s most reliable payment infrastructure, as a Lead Backend Engineer. You will play a key role in shaping Rafiki’s backend architecture and ensuring reliable, high-performing payment infrastructure. Lead critical engineering efforts, mentor teammates, and collaborate with cross-functional teams. Initial projects include scaling treasury tooling, upgrading finance infrastructure, and launching new financial products. You will lead the development of Go-based backend services, design customer-facing APIs, build modular systems, and implement compliance functionality. This role requires strong Go experience, experience in a scale/startup environment, and expertise in various technologies. Rafiki offers a competitive benefits package including generous paid time off, parental leave, a learning budget, and more.

Requirements

• You have at least 5+ years of experience building highly reliable and scalable backend services in Go
• You have worked in a scale / start-up environment and enjoy delivering awesome products quickly
• Experience with RDBMSs such as Postgres, MySQL etc
• Experience with message-brokers technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ etc, working within event-driven architectures
• You have excellent knowledge of the best practices in designing, developing and deploying those services in a cloud environment
• You have experience working asynchronously with global teams using tools like Slack/Teams/Jira as well as other modern communication systems
• Passionate about our product and the mission that we are on
• You are fluent in written and spoken English

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of Go-based backend services, ensuring high performance, reliability, and scalability
• Design and evolve our customer-facing APIs, powering integrations that allow clients to send, receive, and convert funds seamlessly
• Build modular systems that enable rapid expansion into new markets with diverse regulatory and operational requirements
• Implement critical compliance functionality, including KYB, identity verification, AML, and fraud detection
• Automate operational workflows and partner failover systems to minimise downtime and support overhead
• Use data and insights to drive product and engineering decisions
• Mentor engineers, drive technical excellence, and contribute to a strong engineering culture

Preferred Qualifications

• 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)

Benefits

• 35 Days Off : Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore. (27 days + 8 Bank holidays in the UK)
• 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
• Hybrid Working : We work in our Canary Wharf Office three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 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