Staff Engineer

About the role

As a Staff Engineer on the Credit Scoring & Underwriting squad, you'll lead the technical architecture and execution across credit insights products. That means the insights and data platform our lenders already build on, and the new products we're putting on top of it.

It's a hands-on job. You'll write production code, and you'll be the person the team pulls in when a problem is hard or badly defined. You'll also put real time into helping the engineers around you get better, through code reviews and mentoring.

About Lean

Lean is the leading financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East. We power some of the region's largest companies with APIs that enable payments, account verification, financial data access, and other critical financial infrastructure.

What started as the region's pioneering Open Banking platform and quickly became the de facto leader in account aggregation and payment initiation in the region is now becoming something bigger: a multi-product infrastructure company powering payments, data, and lending across MENA.

We've processed billions of dollars in transactions. We're trusted by 350+ clients — from Tabby and Tas'heel to Hungerstation — and backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Shorooq. Our $67.5M Series B was just the beginning. We're expanding into new markets, opening offices, acquiring businesses, and building capabilities that didn't exist here before.

What you'll own

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap of the insights and data platform, and pick up the problems in the squad that don't have a clear answer yet

• Build new financial data products, and write a good share of the production code yourself

• Keep the production APIs inside our clients' application flows in KSA and the UAE fast and reliable. When something breaks, you lead the response

• Work with Product, Data Science and DevOps to plan and scale insights products for credit underwriting

• Represent Lean in technical sessions with lenders, partners and regulators

• Mentor engineers and set the squad's engineering standards

What we're looking for

Must-have:

• 10+ years of backend engineering, with deep Java and Spring Boot experience and several years designing and running microservices in production

• You've built and run distributed, event-driven systems in production, using Kafka or something similar

• Experience with data-intensive backend applications in large distributed systems

• You've owned latency and availability targets in production and used tools like Prometheus and Grafana to meet them

• Working knowledge of infrastructure (Kubernetes, cloud, CI/CD) and security

• You use AI coding tools such as Claude Code every day, for design, coding, testing and review

• You've led architecture across several services and influenced decisions without formal authority. You can explain technical risk to engineers, leadership and clients in terms each of them understands

• Good product judgement. You know when to ship and when to pay down technical debt, and you move fast when it matters

• Experience in fintech

Nice-to-have:

• ClickHouse or another analytical database at scale

• Running ML in production (feature and training pipelines, model serving, monitoring)

• Experience with credit risk, underwriting or lending products

• Working proficiency in Python

• Arabic

NB. While we think the above experience could be important, we’re keen to hear from people that believe they have valuable experience to bring to the role. If you identify with the team and mission, but not all of our requirements, then please still apply!!

Why Join us?

We’re building the financial infrastructure for MENA. Not as a slogan, as a fact.

Since 2019, we’ve become the first regulated Open Banking and Open Finance company operating across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We’ve processed billions of dollars. We connect millions of accounts. We enable companies like Binance, Careem, and Etisalat to build products that were previously impossible in this region.

Our recent $67.5M Series B from General Catalyst and Sequoia isn’t just validation: it’s fuel. We’re expanding into new markets, launching new products, and setting the pace for what financial innovation looks like in MENA.

We solve hard problems. We move fast. We hold ourselves to a high standard. And we’re looking for people who’ve done this before to help us do it right.

If you’re motivated by building something that lasts, not just something that scales, Lean is where you need to be.

Not only do we offer competitive salaries, private healthcare, and flexible office hours, but we also insist that every member of the team hold a meaningful equity stake in the business to ensure long-term alignment. We'd love you to join us for this journey!

Lean is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

When applying for a job at Lean Technologies, we will need to collect, use and share Personal Data about you with different members of our team during the application process. This may mean transferring your data to members of the team in one of our office locations worldwide outside of the country you are in. Please refer to our Privacy Notice on our website for more information about how we may use and store your Personal Data