How to apply for Senior Engineer, Payout Network

About Taptap Send

Taptap Send is on a mission to make international remittances affordable and accessible, focusing on emerging markets where traditional transfer fees are prohibitive. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and a remote-first culture, they offer a unique opportunity to have a direct social impact while solving complex engineering challenges.

About the role

As a Senior Engineer on the Payout Network team, you'll architect and build the core systems that connect Taptap Send to dozens of payment providers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Your work will directly enable millions of users to send money home reliably and cost-effectively, making you a critical player in the company's mission.

A typical day

You'll start your day by reviewing system health dashboards and any alerts from overnight payment processing, then dive into coding a new integration adapter or refining the data flow for a partner. Midday, you might have a design review with the team or a sync with product to clarify requirements, and later, you could be debugging a latency issue or writing Terraform scripts for a new deployment. It's a mix of deep work, collaboration, and ensuring the payout network runs like a well-oiled machine.

Who Taptap Send is looking for

• A seasoned backend engineer with 7+ years of experience, deeply proficient in Kotlin or Java and PostgreSQL, who has designed and scaled distributed systems handling financial transactions.
• Someone who thrives on ambiguity and enjoys building unified interfaces that abstract away the complexity of integrating with diverse third-party APIs, ensuring seamless operations across different countries and currencies.
• A pragmatic problem-solver with strong AWS skills (S3, SQS, SNS, Lambda) and experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible), who can balance speed of iteration with the high-security standards required in fintech.
• An excellent communicator who can collaborate effectively with product, operations, and support teams to translate business needs into technical solutions and manage stakeholder expectations in a fast-paced environment.

Tips for this application

• Highlight specific projects where you integrated multiple third-party APIs or payment gateways, detailing how you handled differences in protocols, error handling, and data formats.
• Quantify the scale of systems you've built (e.g., transactions per second, number of integrations, data volume) to demonstrate your ability to handle Taptap Send's growth.
• Showcase your experience with AWS and Infrastructure as Code by mentioning concrete examples of how you've used Terraform or Ansible to manage infrastructure and ensure reliability.
• Emphasize your understanding of fintech security and compliance (e.g., PCI DSS, data encryption) and any experience with remittances or cross-border payments.
• Tailor your resume and cover letter to reflect your passion for financial inclusion and emerging markets—Taptap Send is mission-driven, so show genuine interest.

What to cover in your cover letter

["Express your enthusiasm for Taptap Send's mission to reduce the cost of remittances and your desire to have a tangible social impact through your engineering skills.", "Detail your experience in designing and building scalable backend systems, especially with Kotlin/Java and PostgreSQL, and how it aligns with the role's requirements.", 'Provide a specific example of a time you collaborated with cross-functional teams to ship a complex feature, demonstrating your ability to manage stakeholder expectations.', 'Mention your familiarity with the technical stack (AWS, Terraform, etc.) and your willingness to learn and adapt to new technologies as needed.']

Research before applying

• Read Taptap Send's blog or press releases to understand their recent expansion, partnerships, and technology evolution.
• Study the competitive landscape: Compare Taptap Send with other remittance services like Wise or WorldRemit to understand their unique value proposition.
• Review the company's engineering culture by exploring their GitHub or tech talks, if available, to get a sense of their coding standards and practices.
• Look up the challenges of cross-border payments in the specific regions Taptap Send serves (e.g., M-Pesa in Africa, UPI in India) to show you've done your homework.

Likely interview topics

Based on the job description, expect questions about:

• Design a unified interface for a new payment provider integration: How would you abstract common operations (send, receive, check status) while allowing for provider-specific quirks?
• How do you ensure data consistency and handle failures when orchestrating payment transactions across multiple systems?
• Describe your experience with PostgreSQL at scale: How have you optimized queries, handled schema migrations, and ensured high availability?
• Given Taptap Send's focus on emerging markets, how would you handle network latency, unreliable third-party APIs, or currency fluctuations in your system design?
• Walk us through a time you had to balance technical debt with feature velocity—how did you prioritize and communicate the trade-offs?

Common mistakes to avoid

• Do not underestimate the importance of security and compliance—failing to mention how you've handled sensitive financial data or adhered to regulations can be a deal-breaker.
• Avoid being vague about your experience with AWS and infrastructure—make sure to give concrete examples of using services like SQS or Lambda in production.
• Don't neglect the mission-driven aspect: If you come across as purely technical without interest in financial inclusion, you may not stand out. Show genuine passion.