About Us
UMO is a stealth-mode FinTech venture aiming to evolve the way people experience money by building a unified, AI-powered, yet deeply human modern money platform across fiat, crypto, and investments - subject to regulatory approvals. The platform is being designed to break down traditional barriers to money across access, assets, and experience, enabling simpler, more adaptive ways for people to interact with financial services.
We are currently developing our MVP and navigating licensing requirements, with a multidisciplinary team of 100+ people representing 20+ nationalities. With our headquarters in the UAE and offices in Portugal and Ukraine, we are united behind a shared ambition and a relentless focus on serving our customers.
About this role
In this role, you will lead fullstack engineering as the hands-on Team Lead for our Payments squad, taking direct accountability for high-concurrency payment flows built primarily in Go services and rails integrations. We provide the room for you to exercise true technical autonomy and people leadership, stripping away micromanagement so you can deeply understand the business and financial context behind our payment processing, mentor your squad, and drive secure transactional features from concept to production end-to-end.
You'll take ownership of:
- Squad Leadership & Mentorship: Lead, guide, and grow a high-performing squad of fullstack developers, actively sharing payment engine context, running thoughtful code reviews, and making engineering mentorship an expected, daily practice.
- As Team Lead, you:
- Own outcomes end-to-end, including dependencies on other teams, success is features live in production, not tasks closed.
- Run and grow the team.
- Act as the reference point - the “lighthouse” in your specialty for other teams.
- Stay hands-on: you ship code every week.
- Payment Backend Engineering: Architect, scale, and optimize core payment microservices and transactional logic using Go (Golang).
- Transactional Integration Pipelines: Connect client-side interfaces directly with complex banking APIs, card programs, crypto payment rails, and major processors utilizing gRPC, HTTP, and low-latency transport pipelines.
- State Consistency & Ledger Security: Control data synchronization and caching patterns across relational systems (PostgreSQL), fast memory databases (Redis), and event streaming (Kafka, NATS, or similar) to safeguard real-time transaction processing.
- Supporting Client Interfaces: Contribute to responsive payment UI flows using React and modern JavaScript/TypeScript when the squad needs it, a smaller slice of this role, since the core craft here is backend.
- Containerized Deployment Operations: Co-own system commitments and pipeline delivery patterns, ensuring reliable, secure, and fully compliant code transport across Docker, Kubernetes, and Flux environments.
About you:
- Engineering Leadership & Depth: You're a senior engineer (5+ yrs) with real experience leading a team, and deep, production-tested backend engineering in Go (Golang). Working knowledge of React/TypeScript is a plus, not a requirement. This is a backend-heavy role.
- Payments Craft: You understand idempotency, reconciliation, double-entry accounting principles, and exactly-once processing — the details that separate payments engineers from generalists.
- Mixed Finance & Payments Background: You bring a practical, hands-on engineering background working with fintechs, startups, banks, or payment processors, with a solid foundational understanding of transaction processing, ledgers, or payment rails.
- Distributed Environments Depth: You feel completely at home operating within microservices environments and understand how high-throughput transactional layers interface with messaging grids and analytic data stores like Clickhouse.
- AI-Augmented Development: You regularly use AI development tools like Cursor, Claude, or GitHub Copilot as a core part of your daily architecture design, code delivery, and sprint planning - expected practice on an AI-native team.
- Autonomous Milestone Execution: You manage deadlines and delivery expectations comfortably, choosing complete end-to-end problem ownership over simply executing standalone tickets.
- Transparent & Supportive Collaboration: You are comfortable working out in the open where your technical output and team decisions are visible, prioritizing high standards, clear communication, and an absolute zero-tolerance policy for rudeness.
- Linguistic Fluency: You speak and write English at a professional level to confidently communicate complex payment flows and align cross-functional global product divisions.
Can get you a few bonus points:
- Crypto Exposure: Practical experience working with digital asset transaction flows, crypto ramps, or Web3 custody integrations.
- Startup Agility: You have spent time working in lean, fast-changing environments and know how to keep your team's designs flexible as product targets adapt.
- Observability Foundations: Practical familiarity evaluating payment pipeline health, transport lag, or error rates using Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki setups.
- Frontend Depth: Strong React/TypeScript craft beyond working knowledge, so you can pick up UI work when the squad needs it.
The UMO Standard:
- Dynamic Work Environment: Vibrant offices and strong local teams across Lisbon, Dubai, Kyiv, and Lviv — with openness to remote for the right fit.
- Rest & Recovery: 24 days of annual leave, dedicated paid sick leave, and observance of Public Holidays to keep you at your best.
- Recharge Week: After your first year with us, enjoy two consecutive 4-day work weeks annually — a built-in reset to help you sustain peak performance for the long run.
- Full Setup: Top-of-the-line hardware and a home office stipend so you can do your best work anywhere.
- Growth Ecosystem: A dedicated learning budget and a clear, accelerated path toward executive-level leadership within the UMO ecosystem.
- Impact & Ownership: Your work directly shapes the product and company direction — not just executes it.