Senior Backend Engineer

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 thinking and customer focus.
• Possess excellent communication skills and a desire to collaborate.
• Live in, or be willing to relocate to the 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 shipping and maintaining complex backends

Our Perks

• Golden Visa Nomination: The Golden Visa system allows foreign nationals to live, work, and conduct business in the UAE without requiring a national sponsor. The visas will be issued for 10 years and will automatically be renewed.
• Pretty Sweet Package: We offer an above-market compensation package in the form of a base salary plus equity. Since income tax is 0% in Dubai you get to keep every penny (or fil).
• Flexible Work: Our team is all based in Dubai, but hours at Ziina are flexible and employees are encouraged to work whenever and wherever they feel most comfortable.
• Insurance: We offer competitive medical, dental and vision insurance for employees and dependents through our provider, Allianz.
• Office Hours: We’ve set up recurring office hours with early employees and executives at the top technology companies globally to advise us across company functions: engineering, product, design, and growth (see above for some of our advisors).
• Educational Stipend: We cover the costs of whatever courses, books, or programs any team member chooses to take in pursuit of leveling up.
• Prime Office Location and Amenities: Our HQ is located in the heart of Dubai’s financial district (DIFC). The office space offers various amenities, including ergonomic workstations, phone booths, and meeting rooms. Employees also enjoy access to a pantry with coffee and snacks.

Our Tech Stack

We’ve built a modular architecture with the principles of reliability, scalability, and maintainability in mind. Our current stack is:

• Typescript and Node.js (our main application’s backend)
• Swift (for our iOS app), Kotlin (for our Android app), and React (for our web apps)
• GraphQL Federation (for our client-facing APIs) and Kafka (for our inter-service communication)
• Postgres (for consistent and durable storage), Redis (for quick fetching), Elasticsearch (for quick searching)
• Google Cloud Platform (for hosting our cloud infra) and Kubernetes (for managing our server instances)
• GitHub Actions (for CI/CD)