Founding Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in South Africa, +2 more countries.

📋 Description

• Design and construct essential financial infrastructure, encompassing accounts, balances, ledgers, KYC/KYB workflows, transaction state machines, and reconciliation systems.

• Create and execute integrations with regulated banking partners, card issuers, payment providers, and payment rails, including ACH, wires, international payments, and FX.

• Develop provider-agnostic architecture that accommodates multiple banks and financial infrastructure partners.

• Construct secure and dependable financial APIs and data models for complex transaction and money movement workflows.

• Establish asynchronous systems featuring queues, events, retries, idempotency, exception handling, and transaction processing.

• Create card issuing and management integrations, as well as multi-currency and FX functionalities.

• Develop internal operations, compliance, permissions, limits, and approval tools.

• Oversee systems and features from architecture and database design through to implementation, testing, deployment, and production operation.

• Collaborate directly with founders to convert business and product requirements into practical technical solutions.

• Set engineering standards and technical foundations for the future engineering team.

• Take proactive steps in uncertain situations and independently identify solutions to intricate technical and product challenges.

⛳️ Requirements

• 3–8+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend or full-stack fundamentals.

• Robust hands-on experience in building production-grade APIs, backend services, and distributed systems.

• Proven track record working on complex systems where reliability, consistency, and data integrity are paramount.

• Strong skills in database architecture, data modeling, and system design.

• Experience with asynchronous workflows, including queues, events, retries, idempotency, and failure handling.

• Excellent engineering judgment and the ability to balance speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.

• Demonstrated experience managing technical systems or significant product areas from start to finish.

• Strong product instincts with the capability to translate vague requirements into functional software.

• Comfortable operating in a dynamic, early-stage or 0→1 environment.

• A natural technical leader who takes initiative without needing a large team or established processes.

• Highly hands-on and genuinely eager to continue writing and deploying production code.

• Considerable hands-on experience in fintech, neobanking, banking infrastructure, payments, or financial technology (a plus).

• Experience in constructing core banking, payment, ledger, card, FX, reconciliation, or money-movement infrastructure (a plus).

• Previous experience as an individual contributor or technical lead at a reputable fintech, neobank, payments company, or financial infrastructure provider (a plus).

• Background in companies akin to Revolut, Wise, Monzo, N26, Nubank, Brex, Stripe, Plaid, Airwallex, Nium, Razorpay, Adyen, Checkout.com, PayPal, Column, or Modern Treasury (a plus).

• Experience in designing financial ledgers, transaction state machines, or reconciliation systems (a plus).

• Familiarity with KYC/KYB, compliance workflows, and regulated banking integrations (a plus).

• Experience with card issuing or payment-processing infrastructure (a plus).

• Experience in building multi-currency or FX-intensive financial products (a plus).

• Experience integrating multiple banking or financial infrastructure providers into a unified platform (a plus).

• Previous experience joining an engineering organization early and assisting in taking a product from 0→1 (a plus).

🏝️ Benefits

• Milestone-based compensation.

• Fully remote and flexible work environment.

• High-impact founding role with 0→1 ownership.

• Direct influence over architecture and technical direction.

• Opportunity to build on an already profitable platform.

• Modern tech stack and provider-agnostic architecture.

• Collaborative environment working directly with experienced founders.