Backend Engineer Tala
Santa Monica, CA

Job Description

Tala is looking for great Software Engineers who want to tackle challenging problems in an innovative and collaborative manner. We pride ourselves on having an ego-free environment. We consider ourselves language agnostic-problem solvers and do not discriminate if you haven't worked with our exact tech stack.

Engineering is a craft, and at Tala we want the internals of our software to be as elegant as the end user experience we are designing. We spend our days scaling our infrastructure and building new features to meet and exceed our user's needs and wants. We teach and learn from another and push each other to be at our creative and analytical bests.

As a Backend Engineer You Will:

* Be part of a growing team that has a meaningful impact on customers by delivering high-quality features at high velocity.
* Breakdown a feature into releasable chunks, estimate release schedule and collaborate with others to work on features.
* Contribute to architectural and design decisions and be able to articulate the impact of those decisions.
* Learn to understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.
* Help ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

Our Ideal Backend Engineer Will Have:

* Experience with building backend systems at scale for at least 3+ years
* Worked on projects that have reached thousands of customers and have individually contributed to many consumer-facing features
* Strong knowledge of at least 1 backend language (Java, Scala, Python, Play, Django) and 1 relational database, (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL) and general knowledge about many others.
* Ability to dive into large existing projects and contribute by narrowing down and quickly understand relevant parts of the system
* A pragmatic and agnostic approach to coding, with no specific preference for any language/framework, and understanding when to (and when not to) apply certain design patterns and refactoring, based on many years of experience with several large projects
* Working knowledge in API development for mobile/web use.

You Can Stand Out by Having:

* Experience with AWS, Redis, ElasticSearch, Kafka, and Spark
* Experience with Agile development methodology and/or CI/CD
* Experience with Docker containers along with Kubernetes or ECS
* Excellent ability to prioritize and communicate in a fast-paced, startup environment.
* Bonus: Experience in predictive analysis and machine learning.

We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we're proud to have a diverse team with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. We focus on hiring talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

About Tala:

Tala is the leading mobile technology and data science company committed to financial inclusion globally. Millions of people have borrowed through Tala's smartphone app, which provides instant, personalized credit to underserved customers in East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Tala is backed by leading venture and impact investors including PayPal, Revolution Growth, IVP, and Lowercase Capital. Tala is headquartered in Santa Monica with additional offices in Nairobi, Manila, Dar Es Salaam, Mexico City, and Bangalore.