Senior Backend Engineer

Role Description

Tala is seeking a driven engineer to join our growing Product Development team. You will work closely with fellow Tala engineers to build and extend Tala’s backend architecture to support new country launches, new features, and a 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.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and maintain robust backend services, APIs, and data integration layers that power key product features.
• Review design documents, perform code reviews, and weigh in on implementation choices from other technical teams.
• Write clean, efficient, and easily maintainable code, strictly adhering to established coding standards and best practices.
• Enhance overall code quality, performance, and security by participating in thorough code reviews.
• Design and optimize database schemas and queries to guarantee high performance and system reliability.
• Contribute to the testing infrastructure to increase code coverage for backend modules.
• Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues quickly and effectively across both development and production environments.
• Advance monitoring and alerting capabilities of backend modules to allow proactive improvements to availability and response times.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in designing and developing applications using Java, Kotlin, and/or Scala.
• Exposure to a web framework like Spring.
• Developed and launched large scale consumer applications with the backend on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure) using microservices architecture paradigms.
• Proven problem-solving abilities and a strong drive for independent learning and work.
• Expert knowledge in REST API design and development for mobile/web use.
• Expert knowledge in architecture & system design.
• Expert proficiency in Agile development process.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to containerization technologies, such as Docker or Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with MariaDB.
• Familiarity with Kafka.
• Familiarity with production monitoring tools, including logging (e.g., SumoLogic, Kibana), basic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools, and observability frameworks such as OpenTelemetry.

Company Description

Tala is AI-native credit infrastructure for the global majority, combining proprietary risk intelligence with an expanding network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale. Backed by more than $500 million in funding, Tala has distributed more than $7 billion in capital to more than 13 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia—building one of the most robust datasets on thin-file borrowers anywhere in the world. Our mission is simple yet bold: to unleash the economic power of the global majority.

Given the global nature of our team, we operate on a remote-first approach with office hubs in Santa Monica, CA (HQ); Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, the Philippines; and Bangalore, India.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.