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 sid