Senior Software Engineer - Backend

Your mission is to be the engineer your team looks to for direction. You will solve the complex problems in your team's domain independently, and you will raise the bar for everyone around you, in the code that ships, the tests that guard it, and the standards the team holds itself to. DZ moves fast on a surface where mistakes cost real money: instant digital-goods fulfilment, live payments, chargeback exposure. This role is about owning your team's domain deeply enough that speed and correctness stop being a trade-off.

What you'll do

• Own significant features and services end to end in your team's domain, architecting them with well-accepted patterns for iterative, autonomous development and future scale, applying bounded contexts and minimising cross-service dependencies so failures stay contained.
• Consistently ship production-ready, self-documenting code, and set the team's standard for AI-assisted development: treat generated code like a peer PR, catch the subtly and confidently wrong output, and know when writing it by hand is faster and safer.
• Apply TDD and mocks where they earn their place, refactor towards testability, and never merge untested code - including adding the failure cases that AI-generated happy-path tests omit.
• Diagnose issues systematically within your services and across service boundaries, tune the team's monitoring, and use operational and business metrics as the basis for stability and performance work. You'll be an active participant in your team's on-call.
• Look actively for vulnerabilities in your own code and in peer reviews, applying secure defaults for auth, input validation and data handling, and design features with abuse in mind (rate limits, velocity checks, idempotency), flagging fraud and risk trade-offs early rather than after launch.
• Anticipate and communicate blockers, delays and cost overruns before they need escalating, work dependencies to resolution without waiting on other teams, and drive continuous improvement of the team's practices.
• Mentor teammates deliberately, including to build redundancy so you are not the only person who can support a critical part of the domain and maintain the runbooks and ADRs that make the team's context legible to both people and tooling.

Requirements

What you'll bring

• 5-8 years building production software, with deep ownership of services in a live, revenue-carrying system.
• Strong depth in at least one of DZ's stacks (TypeScript, Go, C#) plus solid Postgres and AWS working knowledge, and the curiosity to get productive in the others.
• Real expertise in a domain you've held for a while: the services, how they interact, and how data flows between them not just the parts you wrote.
• A security and abuse lens by default: solid OWASP grasp, correct handling of secrets and sensitive data, and an understanding of payment-surface threats such as card testing and credential handling.
• The judgement to weigh cost against value, including where AI leverage genuinely saves time versus where it adds risk someone will pay for later.
• Communication that lands with technical and non-technical audiences alike, a habit of seeking feedback as readily as giving it, and comfort with open, respectful disagreement.

Benefits

• Immediate, large-scale impact on a high-growth business
• Top-of-the-market compensation packages
• Work alongside top regional talent, with team members from Talabat, Careem, Etisalat, and more