Senior Software Engineer - AI Native Platform

About OdolaOdola is a financial app built for established migrants, offering accounts, cards, cross-border payments, and savings across multiple markets. We're early-stage, building fast in a space where the stakes are real: a failed transfer isn't a UX bug, it's a family missing rent or medical care. That shapes our priorities and the standard we hold ourselves to. Our founder previously built WorldRemit and scaled it to more than 130 countries. Odola is the next chapter: a fintech designed from the start to serve people the global banking system has historically underserved. The roleWe are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build the core platform behind Odola's next stage of growth. This is not a narrow backend role. You will work on regulated financial infrastructure, live customer migrations, partner integrations, and the internal AI-native platform that allows Odola to scale without scaling headcount in the traditional way. The role has three priorities: • Deliver critical platform work across our US launch and UK migration. • Raise the engineering bar across architecture, delivery, reliability, observability, and security. • Lead practical adoption of AI in engineering and operations, including agents, LLM tooling, evals, governed connectors, and AI-assisted development workflows.We are looking for someone who has built or shipped real systems where AI is part of the product, the workflow, or the engineering toolchain, and who can help the rest of the team use these tools well. What you'll work on • You will help deliver core backend systems for our US launch, including card issuing, KYC, ledgering, transaction monitoring, settlement, and the regulatory data flows behind them. • You will work directly with card processors, sponsor banks, and payment infrastructure partners. These integrations need to be robust, observable, auditable, and easy to evolve as Odola adds markets. • You will help execute the migration of thousands of live UK customers onto new banking infrastructure. • This includes work across safeguarding, payment rails, customer-notice timing, operational resilience, and clean cutover design. This is a high-stakes migration in a regulated environment, and reliability is central to the role. Odola's AI platformWe are building an internal AI platform across KYC, reconciliation, complaints, licensing, partner oversight, board reporting, and operational workflows. You will help architect and build reusable agents, skills, connectors, evaluation harnesses, prompt and workflow versioning, and audit trails. The platform must be model-agnostic, secure, and governed, with human approval where regulation or judgement requires it. Customer-facing AI, including a multilingual financial companion and pre-transaction scam protection, will sit on top of the same platform. Engineering practiceYou will help define how a modern regulated fintech engineering team should work with AI.That includes tooling, code review standards, AI-assisted development workflows, evals and observability for AI-driven components, secure engineering practices, and the habits needed to keep a small senior team moving quickly without creating operational risk. What you'll be responsible forYou will: • Own significant backend delivery across the US launch and UK migration, from design through production operation. • Design services that are observable, recoverable, secure, and auditable by default. • Build and operate internal AI platform components, including agent runtimes, connector layers, prompt and skill versioning, evaluation harnesses, and audit logs. • Set the technical standard for how Odola engineers use AI tooling day to day. • Translate regulatory, compliance, finance, operations, and product requirements into systems that work in production. • Identify workflows where agents can prepare work for human approval, reducing manual operational load without compromising control. • Mentor engineers and contribute to hiring as Odola scales deliberately. • Work across functions in a small senior team where engineers are expected to understand the business, not just the codebase. What we're looking forYou should have 5+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally with meaningful exposure to financial services, payments, fintech, or another regulated domain. We are looking for someone with: • Strong backend engineering experience in at least one modern stack. We use TypeScript/Node and Python; you should be fluent in at least one and willing to operate in both. • Production experience with payments, card issuing, ledgers, KYC/AML systems, banking-as-a-service integrations, or similar regulated financial infrastructure. • Strong instincts for distributed systems, idempotency, reconciliation, reliability, and correctness where real money is moving. • Hands-on production experience with LLM-based systems, not just prototypes. • Experience with at least some of: RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, MCP servers, prompt en