Engineering Mission: Our mission is to build a scalable, resilient, and secure platform to serve our global customers, to grow our tech teams through treating engineering as a craft, seeking individuals with unique and diverse skill sets, and to encourage each other to grow with a deep sense of humility.

CTO Mission: Attract, develop and lead Tala’s Technology & Data organizations to realize the vision of providing financial access, choice, and control for people everywhere via technical innovation and building scalable, intelligent decisioning systems.

Responsibilities (In this role you will):

• Lead Engineering and Data teams and execute on company initiatives
• Identify organizational gaps within tech team to achieve company objectives. Plan, recruit, retain, and build capacity accordingly
• Facilitate the evolution of a healthy and high performing engineering culture practiced consistently across all offices
• Establish effective, sustainable development hubs across Santa Monica, Nairobi, and Bangalore, staffed with the necessary technical talent in alignment with product roadmap.
• Build exceptional recruiting and retention capabilities
• Coach, mentor and develop Tala’s technical managers on their journey of learning and growth as inspiring and effective people managers.
• Lead the development of scalable technical platforms to support business growth, new country launches, feature development, and economies of scale, in both production and offline environments
• Build technical platforms to meet engineering Production metric goals while supporting business growth
• Optimize the data infrastructure to support model research, development, and deployment (reduce current cycle time by 50%)
• Build infrastructure and deployment systems to achieve continuous integration / continuous delivery
• Ensure superior security and data compliance
• Expand company-wide culture of data-driven thinking
• Ensure data collection and availability across all dimensions of Tala’s products, internal tools, and business metrics
• Provide effective tooling and training to company to leverage data day to day thinking and decisioning
• Enable experimenters to ship safe, informative experiments across the entire Tala product flow in a self-service platform

Requirements (For this role you must have/be):

• Ability to lead and coordinate distinct functions within a global and/or distributed technology org both onshore and offshore (Managerial experience: 150 people, 5+ years)
• Organizational design, capacity planning, recruiting, and ability to execute on those in context of 2-3x a team size to 200+
• Strategic planning (building roadmaps, difficult tradeoffs, decision frameworks) to achieve business goals aligned to Tala’s mission and current growth stage
• An effective communicator who motivates and drives strong cross-functional leadership (technical and non-technical audiences)
• Technical knowledge in scalable distributed systems, data infrastructure, machine learning; proven track record of implementing new systems and products in industry setting
• Experience with cloud technologies including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and/or Microsoft Azure
• Familiarity with modern programming languages such as Java, GoLang, Scala or Python
• Agile driven product development experience
• A technical evangelist to advance Tala’s reputation as innovative leader in fintech

We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse team with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. We focus on hiring talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

About Tala:

Tala is the leading mobile technology and data science company committed to financial inclusion globally. Millions of people have borrowed through Tala's smartphone app, which provides instant, personalized credit to underserved customers in East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Tala is backed by leading venture and impact investors including PayPal, Revolution Growth, IVP, and Lowercase Capital. Tala is headquartered in Santa Monica with additional offices in Nairobi, Manila, Dar Es Salaam, Mexico City, and Bangalore.