Senior Backend Engineer

About Tala

Tala is on a mission to unleash the economic power of the Global Majority – the 4 billion people overlooked by existing financial systems. With nearly half a billion dollars raised from equity and debt, we are serving millions of customers across three continents. Tala has been named by the Fortune Impact 20 list, CNBC’s Disruptor 50 five years in a row, CNBC’s World's Top Fintech Company, Forbes’ Fintech 50 list for eight years running, and Chief's The New Era of Leadership Award. We are expanding across product offerings, countries and crypto and are looking for people who have an entrepreneurial spirit and are passionate about our mission.

By creating a unique platform that enables lending and other financial services around the globe, people in emerging markets are able to start and expand small businesses, manage day-to-day needs, and pursue their financial goals with confidence. Currently, over nine million people across Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India have used Tala products. Due to our global team, we have a remote-first approach, and also have offices in Santa Monica, CA (HQ); Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, the Philippines; and Bangalore, India.

Most Talazens join us because they connect with our mission. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Tala, we’d love to hear from you!

The Role

The Senior Backend Engineer builds and extends Tala’s backend architecture to support new country launches, new products and 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

• Develop, test, and deploy software solutions using Java, Scala, or Kotlin
• Design and contribute to backend systems, making key architectural decisions
• Work with deployment infrastructure and tooling, including CI/CD pipelines
• Handle schema evolution and data migrations in production systems
• Optimize backend systems for performance, including profiling, caching, and JVM tuning
• Ensure code quality and consistency through best practices and code reviews
• Create and maintain clear and concise technical documentation

What You'll Need

• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Expertise in at least one of the following languages: Java, Scala, or Kotlin
• Solid understanding of software development principles, design patterns, and best practices
• Experience with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL) and data migrations
• Familiarity with message brokers or event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration tools like Docker or Kubernetes
• Experience with Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure) and deploying services at the infra level

Our Vision and Commitment to Inclusion

Our vision is to build a new financial ecosystem where everyone can participate on equal footing and access the tools they need to be financially healthy. We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse global team that represents a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and experience. We hire talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.