Senior Backend Engineer

# Senior Backend Engineer - Abu Dhabi On-site

Full-timeL3 — Senior Posted today### What we're solving

Mal is being built to solve the lack of modern, accessible, and AI-powered financial services that are fully Sharia-compliant, targeting the world's nearly 2 billion Muslims and other underbanked communities by offering an AI-native digital banking platform that combines ethical Islamic finance principles with fast, inclusive, mobile-first banking access.## Why this role exists

This is not a maintenance role. These are the specific technical frontiers we are pushing:
** Scaling a live enrichment pipeline.
** Our Personal Finance Manager ingests open-banking data via Lean Tech webhooks and passes every transaction through a multi-stage enrichment pipeline — Lune for merchant tagging, Claude Haiku for AI-assisted categorisation, and a proprietary rules engine. As user volume grows, latency, accuracy, and throughput need to scale with it.
** Deepening financial intelligence.
** Beyond categorisation, we are building cashflow classification, recurring payment detection, RFM segmentation, and goal-tracking. These features require someone who can translate complex financial domain logic into reliable, well-tested backend services.
** Owning a polyglot data platform.
** Our medallion architecture (raw → map → core → pfm → profile) spans multiple PostgreSQL schemas, Flyway migrations, and jOOQ-typed queries. We need an engineer who treats data integrity and schema evolution as first-class concerns.
** Raising the reliability bar.
** We run on AWS EKS with RDS IAM authentication, External Secrets Operator, and Git Hub Actions CI. As we move to production scale, there is significant greenfield work in observability, graceful degradation, and zero-downtime deployments.## About the Role Mal is building the world's first ethical, Sharia-compliant neobank, combining modern financial technology with Islamic values to serve Muslims worldwide. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a transformative role in shaping and scaling our core banking, investing, and Zakat management platforms.

You'll join a fast-growing, mission-driven startup at a pivotal stage, helping to architect a robust, secure, and scalable backend that powers the future of ethical digital finance.

You will work alongside passionate technologists and product leaders, bringing deep technical expertise and ownership to every backend service, integration, and API. At Mal, your work will directly impact the financial wellbeing of millions, bringing trust, transparency, and innovation to digital banking for underserved communities across the globe.##

Key Responsibilities
* Core Services
* Design, build, and maintain backend services in Java 21 using a hexagonal (ports-and-adapters) architecture on Eclipse Jetty.

Own the transaction enrichment pipeline end-to-end:
Lean Tech webhook ingestion, raw-to-core SQL processing, Lune and Claude enrichment, and confidence-scored categorisation.

Implement and evolve domain logic for cashflow classification, recurring payment detection, RFM segmentation, and financial insights.* —-------------------------------Data & Migrations
* Author and review Flyway migrations (versioned and repeatable) across our five-schema PostgreSQL medallion model with full awareness of production safety constraints.

Write performant jOOQ queries and stored functions; optimise slow queries with explain-plan analysis.

Maintain and extend jOOQ codegen configuration as schemas evolve.* —-------------------------------Integrations & APIs
* Build and harden integrations with external providers — Lean Tech (open banking), Lune (enrichment), Anthropic Claude, and internal Mal services — including retry logic, idempotency, and circuit-breaking.

Design RESTful API contracts consumed by mobile clients and internal data pipelines.

Maintain webhook signature verification (HMAC-SHA
512) and JWT authentication (Clerk) middleware.—------------------------------
- * Infrastructure & Reliability
* Work with AWS services: RDS with IAM authentication, S3, EKS deployments, and ECR image publishing.

Own background job scheduling via db-scheduler: design job schemas,…