Engineering Manager

👋 About Us

NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025 and 2026.

We operate two core products:

• NALA, our consumer app making cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia.
• Rafiki, our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments.

Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp - operators who've scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.

At NALA, this isn't just a job. It's ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.

Join us in building Payments for the Next Billion!

🙌 Your Mission

This role sits within Rafiki Engineering, reporting to our Senior Engineering Manager. You'll be joining one of our squads as the Engineering Manager.

The Engineering Manager drives delivery, process, and people management within their squad, acting as the connective tissue between product and engineering to ensure alignment, predictability, and quality of execution - while supporting individual growth and occasionally contributing as an IC.

You'll act as the primary engineering liaison to Finance and Compliance, translating business requirements into technical solutions, and you'll partner closely with your squad's Product Manager, your engineers, the Growth team, and your peer Engineering Managers.

🎯 Your Responsibilities in this Role

• Run squad ceremonies, sprint objectives, and roadmap tracking, keeping engineers unblocked day to day
• Own architectural decisions for your squad, reviewing RFCs and PRs, and monitoring quality post-rollout
• Run 1:1s and retros, and own the career development and growth of your direct reports
• Contribute as an IC where it counts: small to mid-sized PRs, code review, and leading incident response
• Own hiring for your squad: build the hiring plan, run the full recruiting funnel, and onboard new hires
• Act as primary engineering liaison to Finance and Compliance, translating business requirements into technically sound solutions
• Partner with your Product Manager to keep roadmap and delivery aligned, holding the line on what "ready" means before work enters a sprint

🚫 What this role is not

To set you up for success, we want to be explicit about how this role works here:

• This is not a Tech Lead role with informal or matrixed influence. We need direct line management of 4-8 engineers, not dotted-line oversight.
• This is not primarily a hands-on coding role, but you do need to be technical enough to judge your engineers' work directly, rather than through proxy signals like velocity or ticket counts.
• This is not a mature-process environment. We're a sub-20-engineer org and much of our career framework and squad-level metrics are still being built, so you'll be expected to propose the structure you need rather than wait for it to exist.
• This is not a role where challenge is unwelcome. We want you to push back with evidence, but the standard has to visibly move once feedback lands, not just get acknowledged.

🔥 Must-have requirements

Knowledge

• Deep experience managing engineers directly, not through a matrixed or "tech lead with influence" structure
• What "great" (not just "acceptable") looks like in engineering output, and how to calibrate performance against it
• How to run structured people processes: 1:1s, feedback, performance reviews, and career development conversations
• How to decompose large initiatives into vertical slices and sequence delivery to de-risk the biggest unknowns first
• Enough hands-on Go experience to read code, sit in architecture reviews, and form an independent technical view

Skills

• Managing individuals: your own 1:1 framework, regular feedback, and independence on the people side within 30 days
• Performance management: reading PRs and design reviews to judge technical quality directly, not via proxy signals
• Recruitment & hiring: writing job specs and scorecards, running interview loops, and owning requisitions end to end
• Project management: running scrum ceremonies with real numbers (velocity, cycle time, predictability), and forecasting delivery honestly and early
• Cross-functional collaboration: holding a line with Product on readiness, escalating with a proposal attached, and disagreeing-and-committing
• Balancing quality and pragmatism: shipping the pragmatic solution when that's right, and holding the quality line when it isn't
• Communication: clear, structured English, comfortable writing RFCs and presenting technical decisions

Experience

• 2+ years directly line-managing 4 to 8 engineers
• Owned delivery for a squad of 5 to 8 engineers through multi-quarter projects, without a dedicated scrum master or delivery manager
• Run 20+ interviews and owned at least one requisition end to end (spec, panel design, scorecard, offer, onboarding)
• Onboarded at least two hires with a structured 30/60/90 plan
• Worked on systems supporting thousands of concurrent users and hundreds of thousands of monthly users
• Senior-level Go experience: comfortable with concurrency, SOLID principles, and strong testing practices

Behaviours

• Receptive to feedback: pushes back with evidence, but visibly changes approach once feedback lands, rather than the same theme recurring
• Objective about their own team: engages with concerns about a report's performance rather than defending by default
• Diplomatic under pressure: firm without being harsh, acknowledges the other side, and leaves conversations open rather than shutting them down
• Reliable follow-through: things happen without a reminder, and status on others' work is verified, not relayed
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity: proposes the process a small, sub-20-engineer org needs, rather than importing process from a larger one
• Ownership mentality that extends beyond the squad: comfortable contributing as an IC and, over time, shaping engineering-wide process

💪 Nice to have requirements

• B2B or API-as-product experience — our main product is the API, and the web portal is still an experiment
• Payments domain experience: payouts, collections, treasury, FX, reconciliation, settlement, or provider/PSP integrations
• Exposure to emerging-markets payment rails (mobile money, in-country providers, and APIs that are unreliable, undocumented, and change without notice)
• Experience in a regulated environment: working inside a licensed entity, or through SOC2, audit, or licence-application readiness

✅ Success in the role looks like

3-Month Metrics

• Fully onboarded and independent on the people side of the role, you should never be the last to know a report is overloaded, stuck, or unhappy
• Trusted relationships built across your squad, your Product Manager, and your peer Engineering Managers
• A clear view of your squad's strengths and weaknesses, shared back with your manager
• Requirements process running smoothly, assumptions surfaced early, and fewer surprises mid-build

6-Month Metrics

• Squad delivers predictably, with a consistent cadence and forecasts you stand behind
• Clear communication and alignment between Product and Engineering, with disagreements surfaced and resolved rather than absorbed
• Your team is comfortable with you as their manager, and the engineering quality bar is visibly higher on your watch
• You can navigate roadmap requirements, clear obstacles, and confidently ship features yourself if needed

➡️ Interview Process

You will need to first submit your application through our ATS - Workable. If successful you will be selected for our interview process, which has 4 interviewing stages:

• Talent Screen - 30-45 mins
• Pair Programming Interview - 45-60 mins
• Architecture Interview - 45-60 mins
• Leadership Interview - 30-45 mins
• References - We conduct reference checks as standard for all of our hires at NALA
• Decision - We'll aim to come back to you with a timely decision and feedback on your overall interview process

⭐️ Benefits

UK / EU / Remote, we have the following benefits:

• 35 Days Off: Enjoy an amazing 35 days of holidays to unwind and explore (This will be 27 days + 8 Bank Holidays if UK-based)
• Birthday Leave: Celebrate your special day with a bonus day off to take off in that month.
• Enhanced Parental Leave: We offer 16 weeks of full pay for the primary caregiver and 4 weeks of full pay for the secondary caregiver (After your probationary period)
• Global Workspace: Get access to WeWork locations worldwide.
• Learning Budget: Fuel your growth with $1000 annually for learning and development.

For people who come to our London office;

• Private Medical Insurance: Full medical cover through a leading UK provider, because your health comes first.
• Life Insurance: 3x salary cover, giving you and your family peace of mind.
• Enhanced Pension: Salary sacrifice pension scheme via Penfold giving you flexibility and control on how you save for your future! (Applies to UK)
• Hybrid Working: We work in our Canary Wharf Office four days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday).
• Sarabi: Themed snacks and Friday lunch focused on building great working relationships with the team.
• Monthly Socials: Join fun social events every month for great times.
• Free Coffee: Enjoy barista-style coffee at your fingertips.