Senior Platform Engineer

👋 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 & 2026.

We operate two core products:

• NALA, our consumer app makes 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.

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

Own NALA's cloud foundation end-to-end, then architect the shared platform layer that unlocks velocity across both our B2B and B2C products. You'll be the bus-factor fix for our infrastructure, the builder of the connective tissue between Rafiki and NALA, and the person who sets technical direction for how the rest of engineering thinks about systems.

🎯 Your Responsibilities in this Role

• Build and improve the cloud infrastructure powering NALA and Rafiki, ensuring high availability, scalability and security across our systems.
• Improve developer experience through automation, self-serve tooling and infrastructure-as-code practices that increase engineering velocity.
• Own and evolve our observability, incident response and reliability practices to minimise downtime and improve system performance.
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to support new services, migrations and platform improvements across the business.
• Strengthen our security posture by implementing best practices across networking, access controls, secrets management and production environments.
• Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows to enable safe, fast and reliable releases.

🔥 Must-have requirements

• Production AWS experience at scale, with hands-on Terraform and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong experience managing containerised workloads using ECS and Docker in production environments.
• Strong experience operating and scaling infrastructure components such as Kafka, Redis and managed relational databases like RDS.
• Strong understanding of networking, security, observability and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation in fast-moving engineering teams.
• Comfortable debugging production issues and participating in incident response in high-availability environments.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to work closely with software engineers across multiple teams.
• You get excited about owning something end-to-end, from "here's the mess" to "here's how we operate it reliably." You're not treating infra as a stepping stone to architecture — you want to build both.

💪 Nice to have requirements

• Experience working in fintech, payments or other regulated environments.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or self-serve infrastructure tooling.
• Experience supporting SOC2, ISO27001 or similar compliance initiatives.
• Background in SRE or platform engineering at scale (100+ engineers, 1000+ services).
• Experience designing connective layers or shared infrastructure in multi-product orgs.

✅ Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Full AWS estate mapped and documented honestly, including gaps and risks.
• CI/CD and observability gaps surfaced, triaged, and prioritized.
• Intake process running: teams have a way to request infra work and get responses.
• Security baseline assessment complete with Head of Security.
• At least one production incident debugged and response process improved as a result.

6-Month Metrics

• Cloud spend understood and trending down (or justified if stable).
• Key services re-architected for better performance and reliability.
• Measurable improvement in deployment velocity (deploy frequency, time-to-deploy, release safety).
• Incident response faster, more standardized, and partly automated.
• Engineering teams feel less blocked by infrastructure.

➡️ Interview Process

You will need to first submit your application through our ATS Workable.

If successful, you will be selected for our interview process which has 4 stages:

• [30mins] Interview with the Talent Team
• In this stage we want to get to know you a bit more and follow up on your experience and motivations. The best preparation would be to really know why you applied for the role (i.e. your application questions)
• [60mins] Interview with the Hiring Manager
• In this stage, we want to get to know you and your experience deeply and we will focus closely on your experience as detailed on your CV. The best preparation is to prepare to talk about your past experiences, and challenges. Be prepared to answer technical questions. 👍
• [1hr] The Practical Assessment
• In this stage, we want to see you in action. You’d be given the snippet of poorly written Terraform code and will be asked to review it live. Be prepared to debug and review code, along with communicating and discussing the issues you see.
• [45mins] Leadership interview
• The final interview will involve speaking with a member of our leadership team about your motivation for the role and will be a great opportunity to ask any questions you have about the business.

⭐️ Benefits

• 27 Days Off Plus UK Bank Holidays: Take the time to decompress. Working at a startup is hard!
• 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)
• Enhanced Pension: Salary sacrifice pension scheme via Penfold giving you flexibility and control on how you save for your future!
• Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
• Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.
• 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.