Role overview

As a Staff Engineer on the Credit Scoring & Underwriting squad at Lean, you will lead the technical architecture and execution for credit insights products that power the company’s lending platform. Lean is the leading financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East, serving over 350 clients with APIs for payments, account verification, financial data access, and other critical services across the MENA region.

Key responsibilities

Own the architecture and technical roadmap for the insights and data platform while identifying and solving undefined problems within the squad.
Write production code regularly and serve as the engineer the team consults when facing complex or ambiguous challenges.
Maintain fast and reliable production APIs that operate within clients’ application flows in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, leading incident response when issues arise.
Build new financial data products designed for credit underwriting in collaboration with Product, Data Science, and DevOps teams.
Mentor engineers on your team, establish engineering standards for the squad, and help team members improve through code reviews and technical guidance.
Represent Lean in technical discussions with lenders, partners, and regulators.

Requirements

At least 10 years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot, plus several years designing and running microservices in production environments.
Proven experience building and operating distributed, event-driven systems in production using Kafka or equivalent technologies.
Strong background with data-intensive backend applications deployed across large distributed systems.
Demonstrated ownership of latency and availability targets in production, with proficiency in monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana.
Working knowledge of infrastructure technologies including Kubernetes, cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and security practices.
Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code for design, coding, testing, and code review.
Experience leading architecture decisions across multiple services and influencing technical decisions without formal authority, with the ability to communicate technical risk clearly to engineers, leadership, and clients.
Strong product judgment, understanding when to ship versus when to address technical debt, and ability to move quickly when it matters.
Fintech industry experience.

What makes this role worth considering

You’ll be working on core financial infrastructure serving millions of accounts and billions of dollars in transactions across the Middle East. The company has secured $67.5 million in Series B funding from General Catalyst and Sequoia, fueling expansion into new markets and products. Lean offers competitive salaries, private healthcare, flexible office hours, and meaningful equity stakes for all team members to ensure long-term alignment.