Tech Lead

About Alaan

Alaan is an AI-native finance platform for businesses in the Middle East. The platform combines corporate cards, expense management, cross-border payments, accounting automation, treasury, business banking*, and more, with AI doing the work finance teams used to do by hand: coding transactions, chasing approvals and receipts, flagging policy breaches, placing treasury deposits, and closing the books.

Our mission is to simplify finance for businesses so they can save time and money.

Over 3,000 businesses use Alaan, from first-time founders to enterprises like Careem, G42, Tabby, Al Barari, and Rivoli. Since 2022, they have saved more than 2.2 million hours of manual finance work.

Alaan has raised $55Mn to date, including one of the largest Series A rounds in Middle East history, backed by Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and 885 Capital, among others. Headquartered in Dubai, Alaan has more than 250 employees across its Dubai, Riyadh, and Bangalore offices, with a team that comes from Careem, McKinsey, BCG, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Revolut, Rippling, and the world’s leading firms.

Alaan has been named to the Forbes Fintech 50 list, UAE Future 100 list, selected as an Endeavor company, and ranked the No. 1 spend management platform in EMEA by G2.

*Alaan is a fintech company, not a bank. Business bank accounts are issued by ruya.

About the role

We are looking for a Tech Lead to design, build, and optimize our platform architecture. You will play a key role in leading the backend team, ensuring high availability, scalability, and performance of our services. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in Node.js, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), APIs, and event-driven architectures, along with experience in both SQL and NoSQL databases.

You will also be responsible for monitoring, logging, and observability, ensuring seamless performance using tools like New Relic, Datadog, and other observability stacks.

What you'll do

• Technical Leadership: Lead and mentor a team of engineers in designing, developing, and maintaining scalable backend systems.
• Backend Development: Build high-performance, secure, and scalable backend services using Node.js.
• API Development: Design and implement RESTful, ensuring best practices in API security and efficiency
• Cloud Infrastructure: Manage and optimize deployments on AWS & GCP, including infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform/CDK.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Implement event-driven microservices using Pub/Sub, Kafka, SNS/SQS, or EventBridge.
• Database Management: Work with SQL (PostgreSQL/RDS) and NoSQL (MongoDB or Elasticsearch) databases, ensuring performance and scalability.
• Scalability & Performance: Design and implement strategies for high availability, auto-scaling, and load balancing in cloud environments.
• Security & Compliance: Enforce security best practices, manage IAM roles, and ensure compliance with industry standards.
• Automation & CI/CD: Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for seamless deployment and integration
• Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, frontend engineers, and DevOps teams to drive efficient development and deployment processes.

What we're looking for

Must-have skills:

• At least 5 to 8 years of relevant experience in technical development
• Strong proficiency in Node.js with frameworks like NestJS, Express.js
• Experience with AWS & GCP services (EC2, S3, Lambda, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, IAM, VPC, etc.)
• Expertise in API development & integration (REST, GraphQL, WebSockets)
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures (SNS/SQS or Pub/Sub)
• Strong knowledge of SQL databases (PostgreSQL, RDS) and NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Elasticsearch)
• Experience in scaling microservices & optimizing system performance
• Proficiency in logging, monitoring, and observability tools (New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Loki, etc.)
• Strong understanding of containerization (Docker or Kubernetes or Cloud Run)
• Knowledge of security best practices, authentication mechanisms (JWT, oauth, SAML)Good-to-have skills:
• Experience in serverless architecture (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (cloudFormation,Terraform, CDK, C)
• Knowledge of message queues (AWS SQS, GCP Pub/Sub, Kafka)
• Exposure to distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry)
• Hands-on experience with feature flagging & experimentation (LaunchDarkly)
• Background in high-volume transaction systems & fintech is a plus

What's in it for you

• Contribute to building the Middle East’s most beloved fintech brand from the ground up
• Benefit from a role with significant ownership and accountability
• Thrive in a flexible hybrid culture with ample work-life balance
• Participate in exciting offsite events
• Competitive salary and equity
• Enjoy additional perks like travel allowances, gym memberships, and more