Role overview

The Foundations squad at Lean builds the platform infrastructure that enables the company’s AI initiatives—including shared libraries, developer tools, and agentic systems that engineers across the organization rely on daily. As Staff Engineer, you will be the technical leader of this team, making critical architectural decisions, maintaining high standards under pressure, and preventing today’s solutions from becoming tomorrow’s bottlenecks.

Key responsibilities

Drive architectural decisions for the Foundations squad by setting direction on system design that balances robustness, reliability, and pragmatism.
Serve as the technical voice of the team in conversations with other Staff Engineers and engineering managers across the organization, and contribute to Lean’s technical advisory group.
Own and evolve the team’s shared libraries and platform components that the wider engineering organization depends on.
Identify friction points in team operations and champion improvements to processes and service hygiene, driving change through credibility rather than formal authority.
Lead by example on operational excellence, treating observability, alerting, SLOs, and incident response as core engineering responsibilities.
Bring informed perspective on AI and agentic systems, staying current with industry developments and maintaining high standards as this space evolves.
Mentor and coach junior engineers, investing in the growth of those around you.

Requirements

Proven experience operating at Staff Engineer level or equivalent, demonstrating technical leadership without relying on formal hierarchy.
Regular use of AI-assisted development tools as a natural part of writing, reviewing, and reasoning about code.
Deep backend engineering experience with distributed systems, APIs, and reliability at scale.
Strong proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, which form the core technical stack.
Excellent system design and architectural judgment, with the ability to hold opinionated positions that can evolve when better evidence emerges.
Active ownership mindset toward service health, including observability, alerting, SLOs, and incident response as part of your daily work.
Ability to influence and lead through credibility, strong communication skills for both technical and strategic conversations, and genuine investment in mentoring others.

What makes this role worth considering

Lean is the leading financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East, processing billions of dollars in transactions and trusted by over 350 clients across the region. With recent Series B funding from General Catalyst and Sequoia, the company is expanding into new markets and building capabilities that didn’t previously exist in MENA. You’ll be working on hard technical problems that directly enable financial innovation across the region, with the opportunity to build something that lasts rather than simply scales. Team members receive competitive compensation, private healthcare, flexible working arrangements, and meaningful equity stakes in the business.