Senior Backend Engineer

Tala is the AI-native credit infrastructure that connects global capital to the global majority. We combine proprietary risk intelligence with an expanding network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale. To date, Tala has distributed more than $9 billion in capital to more than 14 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, building the definitive contextual dataset on thin-file borrowers in emerging markets. Tala is now converting that foundation into shared infrastructure that partners, capital providers, and ecosystems can build on. The company has been named to the Fortune Impact 20 list, CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies twice, CNBC Disruptor 50 for five years, and Forbes’ Fintech 50 list for ten years running. Tala is seeking a driven engineer to join our growing Product Development team. The ideal candidate is adept at problem-solving and debugging, and is committed to continuously improving existing systems and processes. 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. The Senior Backend Engineer owns systems and initiatives that span a domain. You set your own technical approach, need minimal technical guidance, and raise the domain's quality bar through design, review, and partnership with peers. As a technologist and a leader, you push the team toward a highly available, scalable, reliable, fault tolerant, and performant microservices platform. You follow and improve 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, set in a supportive team environment with significant opportunities for career advancement and professional development. You will collaborate cross-functionally with teams across the globe. Key Responsibilities Design and Engineering • Design, develop, and maintain backend services, APIs, and data integration layers that power key product features. • Author design documents (EDDs) for services in the domain and defend them in review. • Design and optimize database schemas and queries for performance and system reliability. • Meet project goals without trading away quality, and pay down technical debt as part of delivery rather than as a separate request. • Serve as the go-to person for one or more technologies in the domain, following industry developments and explaining concretely how they would or would not apply at Tala. Quality, Review, and Standards • Hold the domain's engineering bar in code and design reviews, including for work from other technical teams. • Write clean, maintainable code that follows established coding standards. • Contribute to the testing infrastructure to increase coverage for backend modules. • Verify AI-assisted changes to the same standard as hand-written code. Reliability and Operations • Define alerting, SLIs, and SLOs, and advance monitoring of backend modules so availability and response times improve proactively. • Handle incidents that the runbook does not cover, fill runbook gaps found during a shift, lead the technical response for domain incidents, and write the RCA. • Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues quickly across development and production environments. Delivery and Collaboration • Own delivery of domain roadmap work and take part in quarterly and sprint planning with a view on feasibility. • Anticipate blockers before sprint commitment, and escalate with a problem statement, an impact assessment, and proposed options. • Work with Product and business stakeholders to remove ambiguity and to understand what success means for a feature. • Work with th