Location
London
Hours
Full Time
Salary
Competitive salary (not specified)
About the Role
NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion, enabling faster, smarter, and fairer cross-border transfers for the global diaspora. Since 2022, we have grown rapidly, scaling our team from 9 to 150+, raising over $50M from top-tier investors, and earning recognition in the Forbes Fintech 50 for 2025 and 2026. Our core products include NALA, a consumer app facilitating cheaper, faster, and more reliable money transfers from the UK, US, and EU to Africa and Asia, and Rafiki, a B2B payments infrastructure powering global giants like MoneyGram and Western Union.
As a Senior Analytics Engineer, you will be a foundational hire for our Data team, owning and evolving the data transformation layer that underpins all reporting, governed metrics, self-serve analytics, and AI-powered capabilities. You will ensure semantic richness, structure, and governance across our data models, preparing NALA’s data foundation for the future of agentic analytics. This role directly supports our top company priority: US growth, and spans the entire data roadmap.
Your Responsibilities
- Own and maintain the transformation layer (dbt + Snowflake), refactoring and enforcing best practices to evolve our data stack to a best-in-class standard
- Take ownership of streaming data pipelines (Kafka or similar) alongside batch transformations, ensuring reliability, cost-efficiency, and seamless integration
- Establish and enforce coding standards, systematic testing, documentation, and CI workflows across all data models
- Optimize warehouse performance and cost efficiency by identifying and resolving inefficient query patterns and materialization choices
- Build the foundation for AI-powered self-serve analytics by enriching models with semantic detail and documentation
- Deploy and supervise autonomous agents against the data stack, advancing infrastructure to proper engineering standards with monitoring, incident management, escalations, SLAs, and documented processes
- Scope and resolve orchestration decisions (dbt Cloud vs Dagster) and own the infrastructure roadmap for the transformation layer
- Support and mentor analysts on analytics-engineering best practices, raising the engineering standard across the team
Interview Process
Applications are submitted through our ATS. The interview process includes:
- 30-minute interview with the Talent Team to discuss your experience and motivations
- 45-minute technical interview with the Hiring Manager focusing on your data engineering and dbt expertise
- Take-home task with full AI tooling allowed, followed by a presentation and Q&A
- 45-minute assessment review with the Data Team
- Final 45-minute leadership interview to discuss motivations and business questions
Benefits
- Private Medical Insurance with full UK coverage
- 27 days annual leave plus UK bank holidays
- Birthday leave: an additional day off to celebrate your special day
- Enhanced Parental Leave: 16 weeks full pay for primary caregiver, 4 weeks full pay for secondary caregiver (after probation)
- Enhanced Pension: salary sacrifice scheme via Penfold
- Life Insurance: 3x salary coverage
- Global Workspace access to WeWork locations worldwide
- $1000 annual learning and development budget
- Themed snacks and Friday lunches to build team relationships
- Monthly social events
- Free barista-style coffee onsite
Experience
- 4+ years hands-on experience with dbt (ideally fusion), with expert-level skills in building, refactoring, and maintaining production-grade transformation layers
- Proven track record implementing testing, CI/CD, documentation standards, and PR review workflows in dbt projects
- Experience building and owning streaming/real-time data pipeline infrastructure (Kafka or similar)
- Strong SQL, Python, and data modeling skills with a solid understanding of warehousing and modern data architecture
- Experience with Snowflake or Databricks, including query performance tuning and cost optimization
- Fluent with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code)
- Comfortable owning an infrastructure roadmap, able to assess, plan, and execute independently
About You
- A proactive and detail-oriented engineer who values data quality, governance, and scalable infrastructure
- Passionate about mentoring and raising engineering standards within a team
- Able to work autonomously and collaborate effectively across teams
- Interested in fintech, payments, or regulated environments where data accuracy is critical
- Familiarity with experimentation frameworks and product analytics is a plus
Qualifications
- A background in data engineering or software engineering with prior coding experience (Python, C++, etc.) is advantageous
- Experience with semantic layers (Cube, dbt Semantic Layer) and governed metric definitions
- Familiarity with modern BI/notebook platforms such as Hex is desirable