--- title: 'Senior Backend Engineer at Tala' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-tala-india-7r88dvn01bam' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-17' --- # Senior Backend Engineer at Tala - **Company:** Tala - **Location:** India - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-10-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/tala/e7b55498-33ed-48fa-ae8c-261082f66906 ## Job description Tala is the AI-native credit infrastructure that connects global capital to the global majority.  We combine proprietary risk intelligence with an expanding network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale. To date, Tala has distributed more than $9 billion in capital to more than 14 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, building the definitive contextual dataset on thin-file borrowers in emerging markets. Tala is now converting that foundation into shared infrastructure that partners, capital providers, and ecosystems can build on. The company has been named to the Fortune Impact 20 list, CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies twice, CNBC Disruptor 50 for five years, and Forbes’ Fintech 50 list for ten years running. Tala is seeking a driven engineer to join our growing Product Development team. The ideal candidate is adept at problem-solving and debugging, and is committed to continuously improving existing systems and processes. You will work closely with fellow Tala engineers to build and extend Tala's backend architecture to support new country launches, new features, and a fast growing user base. The Senior Backend Engineer owns systems and initiatives that span a domain. You set your own technical approach, need minimal technical guidance, and raise the domain's quality bar through design, review, and partnership with peers. As a technologist and a leader, you push the team toward a highly available, scalable, reliable, fault tolerant, and performant microservices platform. You follow and improve Tala's engineering processes and standards while advancing Tala's mission and business objectives. This is a technical leadership role within Tala's technical track, set in a supportive team environment with significant opportunities for career advancement and professional development. You will collaborate cross-functionally with teams across the globe. ## Key Responsibilities Design and Engineering - Design, develop, and maintain backend services, APIs, and data integration layers that power key product features. - Author design documents (EDDs) for services in the domain and defend them in review. - Design and optimize database schemas and queries for performance and system reliability. - Meet project goals without trading away quality, and pay down technical debt as part of delivery rather than as a separate request. - Serve as the go-to person for one or more technologies in the domain, following industry developments and explaining concretely how they would or would not apply at Tala. Quality, Review, and Standards - Hold the domain's engineering bar in code and design reviews, including for work from other technical teams. - Write clean, maintainable code that follows established coding standards. - Contribute to the testing infrastructure to increase coverage for backend modules. - Verify AI-assisted changes to the same standard as hand-written code. Reliability and Operations - Define alerting, SLIs, and SLOs, and advance monitoring of backend modules so availability and response times improve proactively. - Handle incidents that the runbook does not cover, fill runbook gaps found during a shift, lead the technical response for domain incidents, and write the RCA. - Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues quickly across development and production environments. Delivery and Collaboration - Own delivery of domain roadmap work and take part in quarterly and sprint planning with a view on feasibility. - Anticipate blockers before sprint commitment, and escalate with a problem statement, an impact assessment, and proposed options. - Work with Product and business stakeholders to remove ambiguity and to understand what success means for a feature. - Work with the team lead to deliver domain solutions, and own service design and implementation end to end, including regressions you introduce. - Keep the domain's tickets accurate and its documentation complete enough that it is the first place people look. - Work across multiple time zones using asynchronous communication. Mentorship - Act as a dedicated mentor to junior and mid-level engineers, with a clear sense of what each is working to improve. - Technically lead and mentor a team of Backend Engineers building or extending complex modules. Required Skills and Experience - Language: Fluency in English, including clear written communication, which is how most work happens across time zones. - Backend engineering: Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating applications in Java, Kotlin, and/or Scala, including a web framework such as Spring. - Track record: Has led and delivered multiple domain-significant projects, each validated in production over a meaningful period, including large scale consumer applications on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure) using microservices architecture. - Technical expertise: Subject-matter expert in their own domain and conversant in adjacent ones. Maintains a working mental model of the wider company architecture and where the seams are. Assesses code and design quality beyond their own area. - Solution building and system design: Designs services and their dependencies with security, maintainability, operability, and scale accounted for. Authors design documents (EDDs) and defend them in review. Designs for failure cases, not just the happy path. - API design: Expert knowledge of REST API design and development for mobile and web use. - Judgment and problem framing: Reframes poorly posed problems instead of answering them as asked. Decides with incomplete information and states the assumptions relied on. Distinguishes reversible from irreversible decisions and applies rigor accordingly. Choose the smallest solution that solves the problem. - Data stores: Strong relational database experience (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL) and strong non-relational database experience (Cassandra, Redshift, DynamoDB, or HDFS). - Testing and observability: Defines alert thresholds, SLIs, and SLOs for the domain along with the telemetry that supports them. Designs for graceful degradation. Ships new features with monitoring already in place. Co-owns Acceptance Tests coverage decisions with SDET and flags testability gaps before release. - Security and compliance: Follows Tala's security and privacy practices in line with ISO-27001 and ISO-27701, follows OWASP secure coding practices, and remediates vulnerabilities within established SLAs. - AI fluency: Knows when not to delegate to AI and decomposes domain work into agent-sized units with explicit acceptance criteria. Builds reusable context assets, prompts, and skills that others in the domain adopt. Sets the verification bar for the domain's AI-assisted work. Is accountable for AI-generated code as if it were hand-written, and never puts PII, borrower or credit data, secrets, or production credentials into a prompt or agent context. - Delivery and impact: Owns delivery of domain roadmap work and balances feature velocity against technical debt deliberately. Owns an outcome rather than a task list, knows which metrics their systems move, and watches them after release. - Ways of working: Expert proficiency in the Agile development process. Prioritizes and communicates well in a fast-paced environment. Strong drive for independent learning and work. ## About Tala ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Tala is a digital financial services company that provides instant credit, payments, savings, and transfer services to thin-file borrowers in emerging markets, using proprietary AI-native risk intelligence. - **Entity Type**: Private (Funding Stage: Late Stage / Series Unknown) - **Headquarters**: Santa Monica, California, United States - **Founded**: 2011 - **Founders**: Shivani Siroya ## Core Business - **Primary Industry**: Financial Services / Fintech - **Target Customers**: B2C (individuals and micro-entrepreneurs in emerging markets, primarily women), B2B (partners and capital providers licensing Tala’s credit infrastructure) - **Mission/Purpose**: To build a more just and equitable future by unlocking global economic progress for the "Global Majority"—the billions of people underserved by traditional financial systems. ## Products & Services - **Tala Money App**: A mobile-first platform offering instant access to credit (loans typically $10–$500), payments, savings, and transfer services. Available in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India. - **Tala Credit Infrastructure (Platform)**: An AI-native, API-driven underwriting engine built on a decade of behavioral lending data. Tala is opening this infrastructure to partners, platforms, and capital providers to power credit access at scale beyond its own app. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (Private company). - **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$540.6M** raised across 12 rounds. - **Annual Revenue**: **$110M** (latest estimate). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Upstart, Stellar Development Foundation, RPS Ventures, J. Safra Group, IVP, Revolution Growth, Lowercase Capital, and PayPal Ventures. - **Growth Signals**: - Deployed over **$8 billion** in capital to more than **14 million customers** to date. - Workforce of **465 employees** (+11.1% YoY), with offices in Santa Monica, Nairobi, Manila, Mexico City, and Bangalore. - Named to **Fortune’s Impact 20**, **CNBC’s Disruptor 50** (five consecutive years), and **Forbes’ Fintech 50** (nine consecutive years). - Transitioning from a single-app model to an open infrastructure platform for partners, signaling a major strategic pivot and expansion opportunity. ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary AI-Native Underwriting**: Built from the ground up for thin-file borrowers in informal economies, not retrofitted from legacy credit models. This gives Tala a unique, decade-deep behavioral dataset. - **First-Mover & Scale**: A decade of lending data across three continents (Africa, Latin America, Asia) creates a significant data moat that is hard for competitors to replicate. - **Strategic Pivot to Infrastructure**: By opening its credit intelligence to partners and capital providers, Tala moves from a customer-facing app to a shared infrastructure layer, vastly expanding its addressable market and defensibility. ## Strategic Focus - **Platform Expansion**: Converting its proprietary data, models, and customer relationships into shared infrastructure for third-party partners and capital providers. - **Market Penetration**: Deepening reach in existing markets (Kenya, Philippines, Mexico, India) and expanding the product suite beyond credit into payments, savings, and transfers. - **Regulatory & Partnership Growth**: Securing licenses (e.g., licensed digital credit provider by the Central Bank of Kenya) and forming partnerships (e.g., with Mexico’s CONDUSEF, Philippines’ Bayad Center) to build trust and scale. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-Driven**: The company is explicitly focused on financial inclusion for the "Global Majority," offering a strong sense of purpose. - **Remote-First & Flexible**: Tala is remote-first with flexible working hours and unlimited PTO. They offer "Sloth Days" and sabbaticals are a norm. Offices exist for in-person collaboration in Nairobi, Mexico City, Manila, Santa Monica, and Bangalore. - **Invested in Growth**: The company emphasizes continued learning and development, and provides space and support for employees to take their skills to the next level. - **Global Team**: A diverse, global workforce (14 countries) that reflects the diversity of its customers. - **Strong Culture Ratings**: Employer rating of **4.0/5.0** on LinkedIn (222 reviews), with high marks for Work-Life Balance (4.2) and Compensation (4.1). - **Engineering Culture**: Technical staff makes up ~25% of the workforce (118 out of 465). The company is building a cutting-edge AI-native credit infrastructure, offering challenging engineering problems. ## Sources 1. [tala.co](https://tala.co/about/) 2. [tala.co](https://tala.co/careers/) 3. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/talamobile) 4. [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tala_Finance) 5. 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