Senior Backend Engineer

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 tech stack

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

• Typescript, Node.js and Next.js for our main application’s backend
• Swift/SwiftUI for our iOS app, Kotlin for our Android app
• Next.js, React and Typescript for our web applications
• GraphQL Federation for our client-facing APIs and Kafka for our inter-service communication
• PostgresSQL for consistent and durable storage, Redis for quick fetching, Elasticsearch for quick searching
• AWS for hosting our cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes for orchestrating our workloads
• Terraform for IaC
• Github Actions for CI/CD

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 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.

Join us in shaping the future of financial freedom. Every role here is an opportunity to make a real impact. Let’s build something that matters—together.