About Us 

Tamara is the leading fintech platform in Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC region with a mission to help people make their dreams come true by building the most customer-centric financial super-app on earth. The company serves millions of users in KSA, UAE and Kuwait, and partners with leading global and regional brands such as SHEIN, Jarir, noon, Amazon, IKEA, eXtra and Farfetch as well as small and medium businesses. 

Tamara is Saudi’s first fintech unicorn and is backed by Sanabil Investments, SNB Capital, Checkout.com, amongst others, operating out of its headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with other regional and global support offices.

Your Role 

We're seeking an Engineering Manager I for one of our core engineering teams. As an Engineering Manager I, you will be crucial in leading a team to develop and enhance our payment solutions. You will guide your team in building and owning a meaningful segment of our platform, ensuring the delivery of high-quality features that create the unique experiences only Tamara can offer.

Drawing on your proficiency in software development and team leadership, you will be responsible for providing technical direction for your team, fostering a culture of quality, and driving the execution of your team's roadmap. You will lead a focused team of 4-6 engineers (Backend, Frontend, QA) and collaborate closely with designers, analysts, and product experts. Your responsibilities will center on guiding technical decisions, ensuring on-time delivery of the team's roadmap, and fostering the career growth of your engineers.

You are a driven, determined, curious team player, knowing that collective strength means we all win. With a positive outlook, you are solution-oriented–persevering regardless of circumstances, always finding a way through, no matter the challenges. You will effectively find a way to work with everyone through empathy and respect. You will be driven and comfortable with responding quickly with urgency, with the ability to change course without losing momentum and energy, resulting in great success.

Your Responsibilities

• Leadership: Inspire and motivate a team of 4-6 engineers within a single squad. Provide clear direction for the team, aligning their goals with the company vision and strategy. Build a healthy environment of trust, feedback, and a strong sense of ownership.
• People Development: Develop talent through ongoing coaching, mentoring, and providing challenging growth opportunities. Give candid and constructive feedback frequently. Run effective 1:1s, assess performance, and play a key role in helping us attract, develop, and retain great engineering talent for your team.
• Technical Contribution & Ownership: As a significant technical contributor, you will maintain a strong understanding of your team's software architecture. You will provide technical direction, facilitate technical decision-making in collaboration with senior engineers, and drive quality practices like code reviews and testing. You will support the adoption of engineering best practices such as CI/CD and observability.
• Execution & Delivery: Plan and manage your team's execution to deliver on roadmap commitments. Help the team break down complex topics into smaller, manageable tasks in collaboration with Product and UX. Identify risks early, communicate them to stakeholders, and work actively to mitigate them.
• Team Performance: You are accountable for your team's on-time delivery. You will help define and refine team-level processes to improve effectiveness and ensure alignment with broader organizational goals.
• Collaboration: Partner with Product and business leadership to influence product strategy and drive alignment between technical goals and product priorities. Work closely with other Engineering Managers and the architecture board to ensure consistency and shared learning.

Your Expertise

• You have 1-3 years of experience in an engineering leadership role (e.g., Team Lead, Tech Lead, or Engineering Manager), guiding a team of at least 4 engineers.
• You have a strong technical background in software development (e.g., Java, Go, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Messaging Queues, Cloud Services).
• You are motivated by working in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment.
• You have a good understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban).
• Fintech/eCommerce experience is a plus.

Job Summary

Design, develop, and maintain backend services and APIs that power Hala services web and mobile platforms.
Build and optimize scalable, secure, and high-performance systems to support growing user and data demands.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services and APIs that power Hala services web and mobile platforms.

• Build and optimize scalable, secure, and high-performance systems to support growing user and data demands.

• Collaborate closely with product managers, frontend engineers, and other teams to define technical requirements and deliver end-to-end solutions.

• Integrate with third-party systems, internal APIs, and external services to enable seamless functionality.

• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code following best practices and team standards.

• Implement authentication, authorization, and data protection mechanisms to ensure system security and integrity.

• Contribute to architecture discussions and technical design reviews to ensure scalable and future-proof backend solutions.

• Monitor system performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement performance improvements.

• Participate in code reviews, mentoring, and continuous improvement of engineering processes.

• Collaborate in deploying and maintaining services in staging and production environments (e.g., via CI/CD pipelines).

• Support troubleshooting, debugging, and resolving production issues in a timely manner.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Experience: 1+ years of backend development experience in a production environment.

• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (.NET, Node.js, Python, Go, or Java).

• Experience with RESTful APIs and/or GraphQL design and development.

• Solid understanding of microservices architecture and event-driven systems.

• Familiarity with databases (SQL and NoSQL), such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, or Redis.

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (OCI, AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization tools (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices.

• Understanding of security principles, authentication (OAuth2, JWT), and data privacy best practices.

• Excellent problem-solving skills, teamwork, and communication abilities.

• Strong focus on performance, scalability, and reliability.