Staff Engineer - Foundations Platform

About the role

The Foundations squad owns the platform behind Lean's AI ambitions: shared libraries, developer infrastructure and agentic loops used by engineers across the company. As Staff Engineer you will be the technical heartbeat of the team, making hard architectural decisions, keeping standards high under delivery pressure and ensuring the work built today does not become a bottleneck tomorrow. Lean is a financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East, with APIs for payments, account verification and financial data.

Key responsibilities

• Drive architectural decisions for the Foundations squad, balancing robustness, reliability and pragmatism, and defend them clearly
• Serve as the team's technical voice externally, building relationships with other Staff Engineers and EMs and contributing to Lean's technical advisory group
• Own and evolve the team's shared libraries and platform components, including Commons
• Stay embedded in team operations, spotting friction and championing process and service hygiene improvements
• Lead by example on observability, alerting, SLOs and incident response
• Bring an informed, opinionated view on AI and agentic systems and mentor junior engineers

Required profile

• Staff Engineer level or equivalent, able to lead technically without hierarchy
• Habitual use of AI tools in writing, reviewing and reasoning about code
• Deep backend experience with distributed systems, APIs and reliability at scale
• Strong system design and architectural judgement
• Active service ownership mindset and comfort leading without authority
• Strong communicator and invested in mentoring others

Required skills

• Java and Spring Boot (core stack)
• Nice to have: AI/ML integration or agentic systems, internal developer platforms, fintech or payments background, Arabic