USD per year
Senior Backend Engineer at Ziina
Job type Full-time Role Engineering, Backend Experience 3+ years Visa US citizenship/visa not required Skills GraphQL, Node.js, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, Kafka
About the role
About Ziina
Ziina’s mission is to bring financial freedom to every person in the Middle East. We are building MENA’s consumer and SMB financial platform, starting with a peer-to-peer and merchant wallet. Our team have backgrounds from Apple, Uber, Stripe, Klarna, Revolut, Yandex, and Nubank. Ziina’s payments volumes have grown by 10x YoY for the last two years. The team have built a product that is beloved by the UAE with a 4.8 star rating in the app store and is the recipient of 8 international design awards, including the Red Dot Award and the UX Design Award. Our last round was a $22 million Series A from top-tier investors globally including Altos Ventures, Fintech Collective, Activant, Long Journey Ventures and Y Combinator. Our angel investors include early employees and executives at Revolut, Stripe, Venmo, Brex, Checkout.com, Notion, and Deel.
The Role
Ziina is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team. We laid a strong foundation upon which we’ve shipped our product. We are looking for someone to help us build out innovative new features, prepare our technology to scale, and help shape our engineering organization to be the kind of place that bright minds from across the region and the world aspire to work for. As our team is small, our ideal candidate is a creative thinker excited to solve hard problems and to build something from the ground up. They can move quickly, clearly articulate tradeoffs, and have the judgement to own features independently. They are obsessive about delivering great, high quality products to our users. We are ambitious and excited to build big things, and we’d love to bring on someone who is as well. In short, we are looking for owners.
As a Senior Backend Engineer at Ziina you will:
- Collaborate with world-class product, design, operations, and engineering teams to determine which features and solutions will deliver the most value for the business and the best experience for our users.
- Own and ship end-to-end reliable, scalable, and maintainable software that will keep our users’ funds safe and stand the test of time. You will take features from design, to implementation, to polish, to shipping, to monitoring and measuring progress.
- Foster a high-performance culture by mentoring engineers, promoting best practices, and creating an environment where engineers can thrive and grow.
- Design and build a cloud-native platform while leveraging the main features for monitoring, observability, security, scalability, elasticity, and testing.
- Improve CI/CD workflows to reduce time-to-market for new features.
- Help shape our engineering culture by introducing good practices and methods of knowledge-sharing.
Key skills and characteristics
- Be an owner and a team player.
- Be curious and eager to grow.
- Be able to define and effectively communicate technical and design requirements.
- Be able to write clean, high-quality, testable,reusable,and well-documented code.
- Possess strong data-driven thinkingand customer focus.
- Possess excellent communication skillsand a desireto collaborate.
- Live in or be willingto relocate tothe UAE.
What would amaze us
- 6+ years developing software
- Experience working on systems that handle money
- Experience with Node.js , GraphQL , Postgres , ElasticSearch or Kafka
- Experience shippingand maintaining complex backends
Our Perks
- Golden Visa Nomination: The Golden Visa system allows foreign nationals to live , work ,and conduct business inthe UAE without requiringa national sponsor . The visas will be issuedfor10 yearsand will automatically be renewed .
- Pretty Sweet Package: We offer an above-market compensation packagein the formof abase salary plus equity . Since income taxis0%in Dubai you getto keep every penny (or fil) .
- Flexible Work: Our teamisall basedin Dubai but hoursatZiinaare flexibleand employeesare encouragedto work wheneverand wherever they feel most comfortable .
- Insurance: We offer competitive medical dentaland vision insurancefor employeesand dependents throughour provider Allianz .
- Office Hours: We’ve set up recurring office hourswith early employeesandexecutivesattop technology companies globallyto adviseus across company functions: engineering product design growth (see abovefor someofour advisors).
- Educational Stipend: We cover costs of whatever courses booksor programs any team member chooses inpursuitof leveling up .
- Prime Office Location & Amenities: HQ locatedin heartof Dubai’s financial district (DIFC) . Office offers ergonomic workstations phone booths meeting rooms pantry with coffee & snacks.
Our Tech Stack
We’ve built amodular architecturewith principles of reliability scalability maintainability inmind:
- Typescript & Node.js (main backend)
- Swift (iOS app), Kotlin (Android app), React (web apps)
- GraphQL Federation (client-facing APIs), Kafka (inter-service communication)
- Postgres (consistent durable storage), Redis (quick fetching), Elasticsearch (quick searching)
- Google Cloud Platform (cloud infra hosting), Kubernetes (server instance management)
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
Ziina helps move your money forward for businesses and individuals in the UAE. They offer fast and secure payment solutions including contactless payments via mobile apps. Licensed by the Central Bank of the UAE, their mission is to bring financial freedom to every person in the Middle East.
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