Type: Full-time
Level: Junior / Early Career (0-2 years)
Team: Engineering (Platform)
Reporting to: CTO / Lead Engineer
Start date: As soon as possible
Location: Remote-first (Africa / GMT+3 friendly); occasional in-person sessions if applicable
About Flowt
Flowt is building a modern debt readiness and financing platform for businesses in emerging markets. We help SMEs become credit-ready by converting real-world operational and financial inputs into lender-grade applications and risk signals. Our platform brings together: (1) fast onboarding and structured data capture, (2) integrations into bookkeeping and banking sources, (3) workflow automation for financing products such as invoice financing, purchase order financing, inventory financing, and asset financing, and (4) AI-enabled validation and scoring to improve speed, accuracy, and fairness.
Our product captures company, founder, and financing details (including required documents like audited accounts, bank statements, tax compliance certificates, and product-specific invoices/POs), and supports risk and impact assessment requirements (e.g., legal disputes, statutory liabilities, and restricted-use screening).
About the Role
We’re looking for a Junior Backend Software Engineer to help build the core APIs and services powering Flowt. You’ll work on high-impact features that touch onboarding, data ingestion, underwriting workflows, document handling, audit trails, and integrations (e.g., accounting platforms and payment rails). This role is ideal for an early-career engineer who wants to level up quickly by shipping production software in a fintech/AI environment.
What You’ll Own
1) API & Service Development
- Build and maintain backend services (Node.js/TypeScript) that power Flowt’s debt readiness and financing workflows.
- Design clean, versioned REST APIs (OpenAPI/Swagger) for internal and external consumers (web app, admin tools, partners).
- Implement robust validation and normalization for business onboarding data (company details, founders, financing needs, repayment terms, and product-specific fields).
- Work with file uploads and document workflows (e.g., bank statements, audited accounts, certificates), including storage, metadata, and verification statuses.
2) Data Modeling & Persistence
- Design relational data models in PostgreSQL to support complex financing products and application states.
- Implement Prisma migrations safely (forward-only, reversible where possible) with strong auditability.
- Maintain data integrity: constraints, idempotency, deduplication, and traceability of user-submitted information.
- Build event and activity logging for critical actions (e.g., submissions, approvals, document verification, and lender-facing exports).
3) Integrations & Financial Data Ingestion
- Support integrations with bookkeeping providers and financial systems (e.g., QuickBooks) for transactional and P&L data.
- Build ingestion pipelines for structured sources (APIs, CSV, Excel) and semi-structured sources (PDF statements).
- Create resilient connectors: retries, backoff, clear error messages, and fallbacks for incomplete data.
4) Security, Permissions & Compliance-by-Design
- Implement authentication/authorization patterns (roles, permissions, scopes) to protect sensitive financial data.
- Ensure secure handling of PII and documents (least privilege, access control, and safe logging practices).
- Contribute to restricted-use and risk screening workflows (e.g., prohibited categories and disclosures).
5) Engineering Excellence
- Write tests for business-critical workflows (unit + integration tests), and keep coverage meaningful.
- Implement observability: structured logs, request correlation IDs, metrics for failures and latency, and actionable alerts.
- Participate in code reviews with a focus on correctness, clarity, performance, and maintainability.
- Document APIs, data models, and key workflows so the team can scale responsibly.
What Success Looks Like (First 90 Days)
Weeks 1-2: Ramp-up & Foundations
- Set up local dev environment; run the stack end-to-end; ship your first small PR in week 1.
- Understand the product domains: debt readiness onboarding, product-specific financing flows, document requirements, and verification statuses.
- Learn the existing conventions: API patterns, error handling, logging, testing, and database migrations.
Weeks 3-6: Ownership of a Core Feature
- Own an API module end-to-end (e.g., company onboarding, document verification, invoice financing workflow, or integration sync job).
- Ship at least one production feature with tests and monitoring.
- Improve developer ergonomics: better DTOs, validation errors, Swagger accuracy, or migration safety.
Weeks 7-12: Scaling Reliability
- Increase reliability of a critical workflow (ingestion, document uploads, underwriting export, or activity logging).
- Close performance and security gaps (rate limits, input hardening, permission checks).
- Demonstrate ownership: propose improvements, break down work, and deliver iteratively with clear communication.
Required Qualifications
- 0-2 years of professional experience (internships and strong projects count).
- Comfortable building backend APIs (Node.js/TypeScript preferred; strong Python/Java experience also considered).
- Basic proficiency with relational databases and SQL; understands schema design fundamentals.
- Familiar with Git and collaborative workflows (PRs, reviews, issue tracking).
- Strong communication habits: can explain decisions, ask for help early, and document what you build.
Nice to Have
- NestJS experience and familiarity with Prisma ORM.
- Exposure to fintech concepts: accounting basics, reconciliation, loan products, invoice/PO workflows, or payments.
- Experience with file/document workflows (S3-like object storage, metadata, verification states).
- Cloud fundamentals (AWS/GCP), Docker, CI/CD.
- Interest in working with ML/AI engineers and building data interfaces for models.
Our Working Style
- Small team, high ownership: you will ship real features quickly.
- We optimize for correctness and clarity in financial systems (auditable, explainable, reproducible).
- We prefer pragmatic engineering: simple designs first, scalable patterns when needed.
- We document key workflows and decisions so the system can scale with the team.
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive compensation based on location and experience.
- High ownership and growth: mentorship, code reviews, and direct exposure to product and business.
- Remote-first flexibility and a mission-driven environment.