Open job opportunities at TALA mobile loans lender company; Requirements and application procedure

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.

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.

OPEN JOB OPPORTUNITIES AT TALA

1). Backend Engineer

Tala is looking for great Software Engineers who want to tackle challenging problems in an innovative and collaborative manner. We pride ourselves on having an ego-free environment. We consider ourselves language agnostic-problem solvers and do not discriminate if you haven’t worked with our exact tech stack.

Engineering is a craft, and at Tala we want the internals of our software to be as elegant as the end user experience we are designing. We spend our days scaling our infrastructure and building new features to meet and exceed our user’s needs and wants. We teach and learn from another and push each other to be at our creative and analytical bests.

As a Backend Engineer You Will:

a). Be part of a growing team that has a meaningful impact on customers by delivering high-quality features at high velocity.
b). Breakdown a feature into releasable chunks, estimate release schedule and collaborate with others to work on features.
c). Contribute to architectural and design decisions and be able to articulate the impact of those decisions.
d). Learn to understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.
e). Help ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

Our Ideal Backend Engineer Will Have:

i). Experience with building backend systems at scale for at least 3+ years.
ii). Worked on projects that have reached thousands of customers and have individually contributed to many consumer-facing features
iii). Strong knowledge of at least 1 backend language (Java, Scala, Python, Play, Django) and 1 relational database, (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL) and general knowledge about many others.
iv). Ability to dive into large existing projects and contribute by narrowing down and quickly understand relevant parts of the system
v). A pragmatic and agnostic approach to coding, with no specific preference for any language/framework, and understanding when to (and when not to) apply certain design patterns and refactoring, based on many years of experience with several large projects
vi). Working knowledge in API development for mobile/web use.

You Can Stand Out by Having:

1). Experience with AWS, Redis, ElasticSearch, Kafka, and Spark
Experience with Agile development methodology and/or CI/CD
2). Experience with Docker containers along with Kubernetes or ECS
Excellent ability to prioritize and communicate in a fast-paced, startup environment.
3). Bonus: Experience in predictive analysis and machine learning.

2). Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

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):

a). 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
b). Facilitate the evolution of a healthy and high performing engineering culture practiced consistently across all offices
c). Establish effective, sustainable development hubs across Santa Monica, Nairobi, and Bangalore, staffed with the necessary technical talent in alignment with product roadmap.
d). Build exceptional recruiting and retention capabilities
e). Coach, mentor and develop Tala’s technical managers on their journey of learning and growth as inspiring and effective people managers.
f). 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
g). Build technical platforms to meet engineering Production metric goals while supporting business growth
h). Optimize the data infrastructure to support model research, development, and deployment (reduce current cycle time by 50%)
I). Build infrastructure and deployment systems to achieve continuous integration / continuous delivery
j). Ensure superior security and data compliance
Expand company-wide culture of data-driven thinking
k). Ensure data collection and availability across all dimensions of Tala’s products, internal tools, and business metrics
l). Provide effective tooling and training to company to leverage data day to day thinking and decisioning
m). 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):

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

3). CloudOps Engineer

As a CloudOps Engineer you will be responsible for operational health of our infrastructure, ownership and modification of our alerting and monitoring systems.

This is an individual contributor role within Tala’s Engineering track. You will report to the Engineering Manager and collaborate cross-functionally with all Tala teams across the globe.

Responsibilities:

Identify and fill gaps in our monitoring and alerting coverage across our infrastructure and services
In collaboration with DevOps and Engineering teams help with migration of existing product into the new infrastructure and architecture
Participate in planning, scheduling and execution of software releases
Maintain and constantly improve uptime for production and non-production environments;
Build/implement tools to allow streamlining deployment and release process with a goal towards full CI/CD

Requirements:

Expert knowledge of AWS services (particularly CloudWatch, EC2, CodeDeploy)
Good knowledge of modern monitoring & analytics platforms (SumoLogic, New Relic, DataDog, PagerDuty, etc)
Experience with SDLC and building CI/CD pipelines

This Job Uniquely Offers:

Migration of existing countries into Atlas
Ability to travel to our other markets

4). Controller

Manage a global accounting team and ensure the production of timely and accurate financial reports.

Responsibilities

Oversee all aspects of Tala’s accounting department which include, but is not limited to, the company’s financial statements, general ledger, cost accounting, tax compliance, and various special analyses
Manage global accounting operations, including the design of an organizational structure optimal for achieving the department’s goals and objectives
Develop global accounting processes; oversee accounting operations of subsidiary corporations, especially their control systems, transaction-processing operations, and policies and procedures
Implement, document and maintain processes to improve the close and reporting cycles to ensure timely and accurate financial reporting.
Implement, document and maintain strong internal controls; evolve corporate policies and procedures as needed (e.g. invoice processing, cash management and expense policies)
Global cash and treasury management
Ensure compliance with all government / statutory reporting, audit and tax requirements
Support annual budgeting process; provide monthly flux analysis

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance or related field.
4+ years experience as controller or equivalent.
CPA + Public Accounting + Corp Accounting
Strong GAAP and technical financial reporting skills.
Possess exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
Willing and able to work across different time zones; international travel will be required
Experience with managing multiple entities.

Preferred Skills & Experience

Experience with Multi-Currency Accounting, Cap Markets Accounting.
International experience, particularly in emerging markets; understanding of IFRS
International tax experience

5). Customer Experience Project Manager

Tala is looking for a highly motivated Project Manager to help us develop and improve our product offering and experience for regional markets. Tala is a world leader in providing direct loans and financial services in emerging markets. We are a global team with diverse backgrounds who are singularly focused on using technology, data and customer-centric approach to meet the financial needs of the 2+ billion people of the emerging global middle class.

As the Customer Experience Project Manager, you will work with the global Customer Experience team, located in each of Tala’s markets and report to Manager of Global Operations. The role focus is to implement new tools and processes, enhance our customer engagement strategies globally, and ensure that Tala is engaged in best in class customer support. A successful candidate would be someone with stellar project management skills who can ensure that projects are well scoped with clear goals, and implemented smoothly and on time. Someone who can create well defined business cases to advocate for new tools or processes, and an improvement oriented mindset to optimize business processes and reporting. This role is responsible for improving our current product to reduce customer friction and increasing the effectiveness of the in-country teams to provide excellent support to our customers.

Responsibilities:

Excellent Project Manager who is skilled at everything from due diligence, implementation and post launch data analysis for new tools, processes and initiatives
Work with CX leadership on optimizing reporting and tools and determine best practices or opportunities for improvement
Analyze effectiveness of current strategies; identify opportunities for improvement
Report regularly on KPIs at all levels within the organization for transparency and data informed decision making
Source, chart and analyze data to support company goals
Research, identify, quantify and define the root cause of issues, and product friction points.
Advocate for the customer by translating localized needs or trends into actionable insights for partner teams in marketing, credit, and product with the aim of reducing the number of customers who churn or fall into collections and improving our product offering
Create and manage regular metrics reporting for customer experience
Support in-country management in experiments, new process and tool implementation
Maintain accurate documentation for all tools
Support scrum master for department and team level sprint metrics and achievements

Requirements:

5+ years experience in customer support, product development, project management and/or content marketing
5+ years experience in consumer finance or microfinance or fintech or consulting
Ability and experience motivating teams, both indirectly and directly, ideal to have experience with international teams
Attention to detail, with a research oriented mindset to optimize business processes and reporting
Experience and proven success in Project Management
Excellent communication, presentation and building a business case skills
Proven ability to deploy set standards, procedures and policies with remote teams
Analytical, with a data-informed approach to management and decision making
Willingness to travel internationally without restriction anywhere from 10-40% of the time

Preferred Skills & Experience:

Knowledge of the financial services industry (Know Your Customer, financial compliance, etc.)
Experience working with tools like Zendesk, Looker, Amplitude
Comfortable with ambiguity
Flexibility, positivity and creative thinking
Experience working in Agile

6). Data Scientist

We are looking for a Data Scientist interested in solving one of the world’s largest problems: financial inclusion. Our team is doing cutting edge work in the field of Data Science and Machine Learning, using unique data to give people in emerging markets access to something that they’ve never had before – credit. Our Data Scientists work directly with Credit, Engineering, and Data Analytics teams to develop and iterate models that promote our vision of financial access for a billion people in emerging markets around the world.

We leverage a unique, diverse, and deep data set, including text, network analysis, and image recognition. You’ll be surprised by the connections between our different data sources! Our Data Scientist are tasked with finding and communicating these connections to the team while integrating them into various models. If you are motivated to change the world through financial freedom and love working with people and data to achieve this mission, we want you here at Tala.

Responsibilities:

Leverage a unique, diverse, and deep data set to find connections across these data sources. Communicate findings to the team and integrate them into models.
Own the full-cycle of a model from ideation and training through deployment into our production environment. This might be a credit model, fraud model, marketing model, or an iteration of an existing model.
Monitor model performance once deployed and iterate rapidly if necessary.
Contribute and share your findings and knowledge of data science and other modeling with all appropriate cross-functional teams.
Partner with the Engineering team to develop, test and deploy models.
Pull data from MySQL or other data stores, handling all the ETL from the DB to running the model to obtaining a decision.

Requirements:

4+ years of experience in a data science role.
Masters or PhD in a quantitative field.
Fluent in Python and packages related to machine learning.
Experience with deploying data science models in a production environment.

Preferred Skills & Experience:

Experience in building fraud, credit, or risk models
Expertise in NLP, network analysis, or geospatial analysis

A Successful Candidate is (a/an):

Problem Solver: You thrive on finding novel solutions to hard problems. These problems may have ranged from extracting a new dataset from an unexpected source, to building cohorts for customer retention analysis, or the NY Times Saturday crossword.
Communicator and Listener: You thrive on finding novel solutions to hard problems. These problems may have ranged from extracting a new dataset from an unexpected source, to building cohorts for customer retention analysis, or the NY Times Saturday crossword.You know your stuff is complicated, but can you communicate complex ideas to others in a manner that is easily understood and digestible? Can you collaborate well with your peers in growth/portfolio/customer experience? There is a large research component to the job, and this research needs to be effectively shared with the rest of the company.
Independent Learner: We encounter new problems that aren’t in textbooks. You have the ability to learn on your own about new concepts and techniques.
Curious: You aren’t content until you understand why the features you have built have the explanatory power they do, and why they aren’t just a spurious correlation.
Opinionated (but Open-Minded): We are looking for someone to add diversity of thought to our current ensemble of data scientists.
Teammate/Partner: Trust in your team and putting the team and mission above individual highlights (with an understanding that the collection of individual highlights and performance makes the team work).

7). Data Scientist, Research & Statistics

At Tala, we are connecting millions of people to the financial services they deserve. The Data Science, Research & Statistics team operates in a nimble working style, flexing between a variety of business questions and data needs. You will have the opportunity to investigate and solve big questions other companies have yet to find solutions for such as digital identity management and understanding customers fully based on their mobile data. You will be part of an innovative and fast growing team that pushes to provide access, choice, and control to millions of customers.

As a Data Scientist, your goal is to fully integrate with the organization to understand and resolve key business questions through robust exploratory analytics and modeling. In addition, you have the ability to coach and mentor other team members on best practices and our technical tools.

This role will be based out of our Santa Monica, CA office.

In this role you will:

Become an in-house expert on our data infrastructure, proper data extraction and manipulation, and develop scalable, self-service reporting in key business questions.
Build foundational code that levels up the entire team and accelerates our ability to derive customer insights and product performance.
Fully integrate with a cross-functional team to perform data analytics, experimentation, and model testing as we scale into more complex business practices and multiple markets.
Cross-train and mentor team members who are developing their technical and project management capabilities.
Collaborate with Engineering and other Data Science team members to share knowledge around best practices and to QA their work.
Identify new data opportunities and tooling for the organization to improve our analytics and platform environments.

What you’ll bring to the team:

Data driven mindset with advanced degree preferred in a quantitative discipline such as Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering or Mathematics
3+ years of relevant analytical work experience in analyzing large, multi-dimensional data sets and synthesizing data insights into actionable recommendations
Experience in building visualization tools such as Tableau and Looker
Fluency in at least one analytics language (ex. Python, R)
2+ years experience in SQL
Proficiency GitHub, bash commands

What excites us:

Experience with an early stage data science team
Experience in emerging markets (either personally or in professional scope)
Advanced modeling and machine learning expertise outside of school or Kaggle
Ability to look beyond the immediate deliverable, find the real data problem, and solve for it

8). Data Engineer

We’re looking for a Data Platform Engineer to design and implement core components of our data platform and scale it to serve millions of users across the world. In this role you will lead these vital initiatives.

We expect you to work collaboratively with the data science and analytics teams to ship scalable software solutions. Your work takes into consideration the holistic user experience from mobile to data science driven loan decision. You value the craftsmanship of clean and efficient code as well as solving problems using the most appropriate technology. You help set the standards and drive your teammates’ productivity.

Responsibilities:

Develop and deploy platforms, services, abstractions, and frameworks that enable Data Science to iterate and launch data models into production
Design and implement database and storage solutions that fit the needs for both data transaction and reporting
Mentor engineers, data scientists, and analysts on best practices and code efficiency

Requirements:

Strong Computer Science fundamentals
4+ years experience working on backend software using modern languages and frameworks (Java, Scala, Python)
Strong database experience (MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL)
Strong familiarity AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, ELB)
Experience with Hadoop data and underlying file systems (HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive)
Working knowledge in API development for mobile/web use

Preferred Skills & Experience:

Expert proficiency in Agile development process
Advanced degree in Computer Science and/or Math
Excellent ability to prioritize and communication in a fast pace environment
Bonus: Experience in predictive analysis and machine learning

9). Database Administrator

At Tala, we see the world differently. We’re driven by a fundamental belief in people and we work hard to prove their potential. We are all passionate about extending financial freedom to the billions of underserved people across the globe.

We’re seeking a Database Administrator to be part of our Technical Operations team. As a Database Administrator, you will be responsible for the overall availability and health of our MySQL and NoSQL database clusters. You possess a depth of knowledge in the database technologies along with the breadth of understanding on infrastructure, systems, scalability, and computer science fundamentals to solve massive load problems. You will have the opportunity to work with cutting edge technology including containerized highly scalable databases, high-availability solutions, and various automation technologies. You will help develop and maintain a scalable infrastructure that supports our global teams.

What you’ll do:

Work with engineering and business stakeholders to understand data requirements and unify solutions.
Help shape the rapidly growing data needs by evaluating and recommending the best relational and non-relational data based solutions.
Design schema, access patterns, locking strategy, SQL/NoSQL development, and tuning current and future applications in our stack
Create, manage, and monitor high-availability (HA) database clusters
Proactive performance tuning of existing and future database clusters
Monitor performance metrics, response times, and request rates across all our data stores
Design and implement disaster recovery (DR) solutions
Improving availability and build telemetry to show SLOs
Lead automation efforts across multiple data systems

What you have:

5+ years of hands-on experience administering distributed data stores (Snowflake, HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive)
Expert knowledge in AWS data services (RDS, ElasticSearch)
Experience designing and supporting development, testing. and production databases.
Experience setting up replication, sharding and other high availability solutions.
Preferred BS Degree in Computer Science and/or Math or equivalent skills
Excellent ability to communicate and collaborate with a globally distributed team
Experience working with DevOps and Agile/Scrum teams
Capacity evaluation in terms of projection and status quo in terms of storage, performance
Not afraid to wear multiple hats – no job being too small or too large

Unique experiences this role will provide:

Responsible for managing the entire data store pipeline
Deploying highly available and critical financial data across the world
Scale and automation in mind
Opportunity to go to our markets (Kenya, Tanzania, Philippines, Mexico, India)

10). Mobile Engineer

At Tala, we build products that help expand financial access, choice and control globally. Working with our technology and engineering team is part art, part skill—and all heart. We like to surround ourselves with other smart people that will challenge us and bring new thinking to the team to help us build better products.

We are looking for a Mobile Engineer to produce life-changing financial services applications. In this role, you’ll be helping develop our Android application as well as contributing to the core architecture of the system. Creating a global credit-scoring platform involves solving problems that are both conceptually and technically hard, so you’ll get a mix of experience including engineering and scaling for a high-volume mobile platform. Enthusiasm and drive for crafting a great user experience is a must. If you enjoy taking a complicated idea/process and simplifying it for the user into a beautiful and compelling experience then our team may be the right place for you.

What You’ll Own:

Contribute to architectural and design decisions your team makes and be able to articulate the impact of those decisions
Work closely with product managers and UX team to take an idea from concept to delivery
Ensure APIs are connected seamlessly from back-end to consumer-facing application
Suggest ideas for how to improve user experience and flow
Breakdown a feature into releasable chunks, estimate release schedules, and work on features with your team
Proactively develop hypotheses for product improvements and additional solutions that can be added
Carefully evaluate the technical tradeoffs of every decision
Work with the Design team to hone in on the best UI and infrastructure practices
Carry out code reviews to guarantee code quality
Be part of a team that builds impactful features for our customers

What You’ll Bring to the Table:

Solid understanding of object-oriented programming
Extensive knowledge of Java, Kotlin and the Android SDK
Shipped multiple Android Applications that are currently available in the Google Play Store
Passion for implementing beautiful user interfaces on Android
Exceptional ability to debug and optimize complex Android applications on real devices
Experience with ATSL including Espresso and UI Automator
Experience integrating Analytics tools for Android
Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science

Ideal Skills & Attributes:

3+ years of experience as a software engineer
Excellent language and communication skills
Strong Computer Science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, memory management, concurrency) with demonstrated ability to apply these skills to solve hard real world problems
Experience with Agile Development Methodology (e.g. Scrum)
Thorough understanding of synchronous vs. asynchronous calls (threading, synchronization, AsyncTasks, etc.)
Expertise with the Android ecosystem, including deep knowledge of the Android SDK and/or other development environments for Android (NDK, Go on Android, etc.)
A thorough understanding of the Android platform’s performance, strengths, and trade-offs
Deep knowledge of Android at the OS-level

11). Global Head of Talent Acquisition

Global Head of Talent Acquisition

At Tala, we are connecting millions of people to the financial services they deserve. We’re a thriving team and we are looking for an exceptionally capable Head of Global Talent Acquisition. Tala’s mission of providing financial access, choice, and control to underserved people around the world relies on our foundation of extraordinary talent and unbeatable company culture. Hiring top talent inglobally in emerging markets and in LA is no easy task, but we have a creative and dedicated team who has helped Tala scale to over 500 Tala-ites in 5 countries over the past 6 years.

As the senior leader for Talent Acquisition, you will shape and lead Tala’s talent acquisition strategy. You are someone who thrives on building communities, networks, and teams of people committed to our mission of financial inclusion. You naturally project positive energy and go out of your way to build relationships with all partners. You’re a solutions-oriented problem solver, able to both identify potential problems and recommend practical solutions by delivering high quality, consistent metrics to leaders. Lastly, you are able to maneuver seamless through strategic, operational, and tactical work and be hands-on in implementing strategic talent acquisition solutions that will enable Tala to recruit and retain top industry talent globally.

About you:

You elevate others to excellence – you have experience coaching and developing a global team and leading through vision and values.
You can juggle a lot. You will carry your own requisitions while leading strategy.
Your curiosity leads you to unexpected places – you are continuously scanning the world for strategic context and inspiration that fuels our strategy and leads you to make connections that advance our strategy.
You are an experimenter – Status quo is not the way you roll. Growth mindset, strategic agility, driving innovation, learning quickly, and pushing for what’s possible is your norm.
You create community – you embrace the power of storytelling and can use social media to create communities of people who want to be part of our movement.
You are accountable – to our candidates, to our leaders, and to our brand. You have no problem advocating for candidate experience to senior leaders – every candidate is a customer.
You know your stuff – You can get going quickly in order to effectively support your client groups tactically and strategically. You establish and evolve performance metrics that inform where we shine and where we have opportunity to improve.
Our mission fuels you – You have an authentic connection to our brand and our mission that helps you advance our culture.

What you’ll do:

Lead and Shape Strategy

Develop and execute brand talent acquisition strategies and approaches in partnership with our Brand and Communications Team, Chief People Officer, People Business Partners, Global Talent Acquisition Partners and Leadership Team
Build effective pipeline and sourcing strategy using a combination of talent branding, external search, direct sourcing, online postings, referrals, social media, internal talent mining and other relevant methods
Understand global market drivers and challenges to identify new talent pools

Deliver on Recruitment Activities

Responsible for effective execution and managing end to end recruiting process to achieve or exceed service level standards.
Manage and lead HQ and global recruiting teams. Holds team accountable for performance measured both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Leverage Data and Innovation to Get Results

Seeks out and demonstrates industry & competitor and other business trends to ensure we stay ahead of the competition
Develop, track, and analyze TA metrics globally in order to implement continuous improvement of strategies and processes.
Develop and implement workforce plans, refine hiring forecasting capabilities, and establish and report on compensation strategy based on market trends.

Build Organizational Capability

Create an environment where there is shared ownership with leadership around building a culture of hiring company-wide in support of achieving our business objectives
Develop leadership capability around developing buy/build plans
Find opportunities for senior leaders to actively connect with talent, speak at events and promote Tala’s mission in targeted and strategic ways
Provide direction, consultation and education to hiring managers on hiring process and methodologies

Competencies:

Demonstrated knowledge of strategic workforce planning and delivering highly-impactful TA results in a fast paced, high dynamic environment.
At least 7-10 years of global talent acquisition experience in a growth organization.
At least 5 years of managing a team of talent acquisition professionals (with a preference for having managed remote teams in emerging markets).
At least 3 years of managing complex vendor relationships within the temporary/contingent/executive staffing space.
Solid analytical skills, with a keen eye for metrics, data and reporting. Familiarity with ATS systems.
Experience contributing to employer branding programs.

12). Principal Data Scientist

We are looking for a Principal Data Scientist who’s interested in solving one of the world’s largest problems: financial inclusion. Our team is doing cutting edge work in the field of Data Science and Machine Learning, using unique data to give people in emerging markets access to something that they’ve never had before – credit. Our Data Scientists work directly with Credit, Engineering, and Data Analytics teams to develop and iterate models that promote our vision of financial access for a billion people in emerging markets around the world.

We leverage a unique, diverse, and deep data set, including text, network analysis, and image recognition. You’ll be surprised by the connections between our different data sources! Our Data Scientists are tasked with finding and communicating these connections to the team while integrating them into various models. If you are motivated to change the world through financial freedom and love working with people and data to achieve this mission, we want you here at Tala.

You Will:

Develop and codify best practices for modeling, testing, and analysis across the team
Lead collaboration with cross functional teams to set a vision for data science and support data driven decision making with analyses and algorithm development
Translate highly technical concepts into solutions and deliverables for stakeholders and senior management
Continue to grow our Data Science team by recruiting junior data scientists to support the rapid growth of our core business and help deepen the integration of data science across the company
Leverage a unique, diverse, and deep data set to find connections across these data sources. Communicate findings to the team and integrate them into models
Own the full-cycle development of a model from ideation and training through deployment into our production environment. This might be a credit model, fraud model, marketing model, or an iteration of an existing model.
Lead monitoring framework for model performance once deployed and iterate rapidly if necessary
Contribute and share your findings and knowledge of data science and other modeling with all appropriate cross-functional teams
Partner with the Engineering to develop, test, and deploy models

You Have:

7+ years of experience in a data science role
Masters or PhD in a quantitative field
Expert knowledge of modern machine learning algorithms and statistical inference
Strong programming skills specifically in Python
Proven ability to tackle business problems with data science solutions in production

Bonus: Expertise in NLP, network analysis, or geospatial analysis
Bonus: Experience in building fraud, credit, or risk models

You are:

Problem Solver: You thrive on finding novel solutions to hard problems. These problems may have ranged from extracting a new dataset from an unexpected source, to building cohorts for customer retention analysis, or the NY Times Saturday crossword.
Communicator and Listener: You know your stuff is complicated, but can you communicate complex ideas to others in a manner that is easily understood and digestible? Can you collaborate well with your peers in growth/portfolio/customer experience? There is a large research component to the job, and this research needs to be effectively shared with the rest of the company.
Curious: You aren’t content until you understand why the features you have built have the explanatory power they do, and why they aren’t just a spurious correlation.
Opinionated (but Open-Minded): We are looking for someone to add diversity of thought to our current ensemble of data scientists.
Teammate/Partner: Trust in your team and putting the team and mission above individual highlights (with an understanding that the collection of individual highlights and performance makes the teamwork).

13). Product Lead, New Account

Drive new product initiatives in emerging markets for the purpose of unlocking financial access, choice, and control for the underserved. Join a cross-functional squad of LA and in-country team members to develop deep user understanding to deliver sustainable, user-centric solutions.

Responsibilities:

Ship new products, deliver on KPIs and develop deep product expertise within a cross-functional team
Develop a strong understanding of in-country context, user needs, and competitive landscape
Be the team champion to ensure team alignment, advocate product and elevate morale
Global travel required

Requirements:

5+ years of product experience, preferably in any of the following: payments, banking, emerging markets, personal finance, or consumer mobile
Demonstrated ability to launch new products from inception to successful rollout
Contribute individually as well as recruit and develop other product managers, either informally through a mentorship role or formally through a managerial role
Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with experience shipping user-centric products
Proficient with the latest methods of product discovery and development
Effective communicator that can listen, surface timely questions as well as motivate others
Curiosity and knowledge of technical and product innovation and trends
Checked ego, humble, empathetic, collaborative, service-oriented attitude of “user first”

14). Product Manager, Credit

Lead global credit initiatives to unlock financial access, choice, and control for the underserved by building out financial products for the Tala ecosystem. This role will lead a cross-functional squad of local and in-country team members to improve an user’s financial health by developing a deep understanding of the user and delivering user-centric solutions.

Responsibilities:

Create global credit businesses that are locally relevant and sustainable
Lead cross-functional squad to align, prioritize, and execute roadmap against financial KPIs
Scale operational needs such as identity verification, payments negotiations
Partner with credit, data and collections teams to ship both user-facing and internal products
Develop strong understanding of in-country context, user needs, and competitive landscape

Requirements:

5+ years product experience in credit; consumer mobile, emerging markets, payments experience a plus
Deep understanding of the macro-economic credit environment of our markets
Excellent analytical and problem solving skills with a history of shipping successful credit products
Effective communicator that listens, motivates, and inspires with strong cross-functional leadership and understanding
Checked ego, humble, empathetic, collaborative, service-oriented attitude of “user first”

15). Product Marketing Manager

About Tala

Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Tala is a mobile technology and data science company that is working to expand financial access, choice and control to underserved consumers globally. Tala’s smartphone app instantly evaluates customers for credit using only the data on their devices and delivers customized loans in minutes.

We are reinventing credit by using alternative data to underwrite customers in real time, without reliance on traditional credit reports and helping our users build an entirely new financial identity through digital credit. Our proprietary identity and credit scoring technologies have helped us lend to over 1M+ customers overlooked by traditional finance – with the goal of serving an estimated underserved population of 3 billion globally!

Our Mission

At Tala, we see the world differently. We’re driven by a fundamental belief in people, and we work hard to prove their potential. We take risks that others won’t, in order to put more power in our customers’ hands. Every day, we challenge the limits of a system that has left 3 billion people behind – committing to building a world where underserved people everywhere have financial access, choice, and control. We call this way of doing things Radical Trust. We think trust will be the currency that drives a better financial system – one that sees, understands and serves more of the world’s people.

The Role

We’re looking for a passionate product marketer who is interested in solving one of the world’s largest problems, financial inclusion. Our team is doing cutting-edge work in data science and machine learning, using unique data to give people in emerging markets access to credit — something they’ve never had before. This helps us realize the vision of unlocking financial access, choice, and control for underserved people globally.

As a Product Marketing Manager, you will be responsible for creating strategies that connect our customers, market, and product to deepen customer engagement and retention. You will help shape the voice of the product to our customer and the voice of our customers to our internal teams. You will uncover insights to launch and test products that empower, inspire, and ultimately drive customer loyalty.

Responsibilities:

Own the product positioning and go-to market strategy working with cross functional teams including product, data, research, in-country growth, and brand
Develop and test targeted messaging and value propositions for new and existing features focused on driving customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy
Partner with product and in-country growth teams to pilot and scale successful experiments

What you’ll need:

5+ years product and growth marketing experience delivering successful acquisition and engagement strategies
Demonstrated problem solving and analytical capabilities to drive decision making and testing strategy
Proven ability to leverage user insights, data, and brand story to craft a message that resonates with our users across channels and markets
Strong communicator and collaborator
Customer-first approach, leading with empathy and desire to understand our market, customers, and competitors
Bias towards action, outcomes, and growth-mindset

Additional Information

Tala, formerly known as InVenture, is backed by Google Ventures, IVP, Revolution, Ribbit Capital, Lowercase Capital, Data Collective, Collaborative Fund and other leading venture and impact investors. In 2016, Fast Company ranked Tala, formerly known as InVenture, as one of its top 10 companies in Money, and Forbes named Tala as one of the top 50 FinTech companies in the world. Additionally, Tala’s work has been highlighted by the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, TED, and Wired, among others.

Benefits and Perks

We offer a competitive benefits package including comprehensive health and wellness coverage, 401k and reimbursement for commuting expenses. To promote healthy work-life balance, we offer unlimited paid time off and paid parental leave. At Tala, we provide enriching opportunities for personal and professional development, including travel to our global markets to meet with actual customers.

16). Security Engineer

At Tala, we see the world differently. We’re driven by a fundamental belief in people and we work hard to prove their potential. As a Security Engineer, you will be tasked with improving the security of our platform that enables millions of customers to gain financial access and freedom across the globe.

Trust and security are fundamental to the success we’ve had in our current markets and will only become more important as we scale and launch even more markets. We take an approach to security that is data-driven and requires engineers with a mindset around measurement and principled decision making when it comes to risk. As a Security Engineer at Tala, you are passionate about finding security weaknesses and crafting scalable and usable solutions. You will provide expert advice and consultancy to internal customers on risk assessment, incident triage, threat modeling, and security vulnerability mitigation. You will collaborate with engineering teams to drive product roadmaps by providing security requirements that map security controls to service features.

What you’ll do:

Implement information security controls and patterns that support risk assessments and the development of secure architectures
Architect, deploy, configure, and maintain application security features of WAF and Bot detection technologies
Work in conjunction with application development teams to tune and configure WAF rules and attack responses
Use security tools and services to audit environment, detect issues, and coordinate remediation of issues
Work in conjunction with DevOps team to automate and streamline the security processes and procedures
Identify and implement policies and processes to ensure regulatory and PII compliance in all of our markets
Evaluate and work with teams to recommend new and emerging security technologies for use inside and outside the security organization
Helping engineers design more secure systems via design input or code review
Be an advocate for customer trust

What you have:

Expertexperience working with AWS services such as GuardDuty, Key Management, Inspector, S3, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, Cloudtrail, AWS Config, EC2, VPC, IAM
Strong understanding of PaaS/IaaS and software defined networking
Strong understanding of cloud networking, operations, automation, and orchestration
Strong proficiency in scripting (Perl, Python, etc.)
Experience in threat modeling and risk identification.
Experience in security vulnerability assessments and remediation techniques.
Experience developing and delivering security software tools.
Experience with security in service-oriented architectures and web services.
Experience in penetration testing and exploitability-focused vulnerability assessment.
Detailed knowledge of standards for authentication and authorization.

This Role Uniquely Offers:

Responsible for securing our whole AWS/Cloud Operations
Securing and automation of security practices across the world for Tala apps
Ability to build an infrastructure that sits around the world
Opportunity to go to our markets (Kenya, Philippines, Mexico, India)

17). Senior Backend Engineer

As a Senior Backend Engineer You Will:

Design and implement complex, distributed platforms for storing data, scaling parallel algorithms, etc.
Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.
Understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.
Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

Our Ideal Senior Backend Engineer Will Have:

Strong Computer Science fundamentals.
5+ years’ experience working on backend software using modern languages and frameworks (Java, Scala, Python, Play, Django).
Strong relational database experience (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL).
Working knowledge in API development for mobile/web use.
Experience with developing complex software systems scaling to thousands of users with production quality deployment, monitoring and reliability.
Ability to decompose complex business problems and lead a team in solving them.

You Can Stand Out by Having:

Expert proficiency in Agile development process.
Advanced degree in Computer Science and/or Math.
Excellent ability to prioritize and communicate in a fast-paced, startup environment.
Bonus: Experience in predictive analysis and machine learning.

18). Senior Credit Analyst

We are reinventing credit by using alternative data to underwrite customers in real time, without reliance on traditional credit reports and helping our users build an entirely new financial identity through digital credit. Our proprietary identity and credit scoring technologies have helped us lend to over 4M+ customers overlooked by traditional finance – with the goal of serving an estimated underserved population of 3 billion globally!

Our Mission

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Credit Analyst to help manage credit risk across each of our markets, with a focus on enhancing our relationship with existing customers. In this role, you will analyze data to identify opportunities to optimize our loan product across dimensions including limit, price, term and collections strategy and make recommendations for change. You will also have the opportunity to influence new product development. You will report to a Senior Credit and Risk Manager, and collaborate closely with partner teams including growth, data, collections, and engineering.

Responsibilities:

Develop deep understanding of Tala’s loan product and the economics and risks associated in various markets
Use past loan data to find opportunities to optimize our loan terms, including approval criteria, loan limit size, interest rate, and term
Use past collections data to find opportunities to optimize our collections strategy to increase cure rates
Design, implement, and monitor credit and collections experiments
Monitor and assess loan portfolio performance
Partner with data teams to identify new use cases of data to assess credit risk
Partner with technical teams to prioritize and deploy recommendations; monitor effectiveness of recommendations

Qualifications:

Proficiency in SQL or R
2-3 years professional experience in an analytical credit or fraud role at a financial services or technology company
Bachelor’s degree in any field which requires logically creative thinking
Proven strong analytical and problem solving skills including
Ability to independently drive analysis concluding with rationalized recommendations
Strong technical communications skills

19). Senior Designer, Brand

About Tala

Our Mission

The Role

In this role, you will work on helping to form the Tala visual brand and define how it’s expressed across multiple customer touchpoints, both online and offline. You’ll work on engaging and compelling designs for social, website, brand marketing, and to a lesser extent ad creative and internal projects. A typical day in this role would involve working on many different types of projects including brand patterns and icons, social media posts, website updates, and emails as well as other online and offline marketing projects. You would exhibit a thoughtful approach to producing quality designs and help establish a high visual design standard that is relevant and resonant in a variety of global markets and contexts.

The candidate who would thrive at Tala has a genuine interest in helping people, welcomes a challenge, is respectful, and brings a fresh diverse perspective to the team. You have a steller mix of visual acumen, creative thinking, writing, project management, a genuine curiosity in data and are passionate about making high-quality brand and marketing creative. Above all, you understand the importance of helping build a global brand with creative that resonates in different countries across the world.

What you’ll do

Work closely with the Senior Design Lead to help evolve the Tala visual brand
Partner with internal stakeholders to produce visual design creative (including icons, animated gifs and illustrations) for digital marketing campaigns across all channels including social media, website, email, in-app messages, ads and more
Leverage data & learnings to help inform the creative process
Generate ideas, inspire your teammates, respectfully give and receive feedback
Ability to self-manage to meet multiple deadlines, prioritize work, and keep projects moving forward

What you’ll need

7+ years of experience working in graphic design
Skills in two or more disciplines: graphic design, 2D animation or illustration
A link to an online portfolio showcasing relevant work (include link on your resume)
Experience working with consumer brands either in-house or at an agency
Possess deep customer empathy and awareness of the impact of design
Experience establishing and working within brand guidelines while localizing creative to fit marketing needs
Strong command of design principles, typography, color theory, and conceptual thinking
Expert knowledge of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, particularly Photoshop and Illustrator. Working knowledge of Sketch. Knowledge of AfterEffects or any animation program is a plus.
Comfortable working with Slack, Asana, and GSuite, or willingness to learn.
Collaborative and fun! You love working across multiple teams with passionate and fun people who believe in the Tala mission.

Additional Information

Benefits and Perks

20). Senior DevOps Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to support and maintain the core components of our financial platform and scale it to serve millions of users across the world. The technical scope of the project is broad and leverages a variety of cutting-edge commercial and open source tools to get the job done.

Responsibilities:

Assist in infrastructure migration process to IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
Build and deploy monitoring and alerting systems across our entire infrastructure
Complete migration to CI/CD deployment model
Support integration projects with 3rd party services (Payment Rails, SMS/Email, KYC, Analytics, etc.)
Build, maintain, and own InfoSec compliance efforts by implementing and enforcing appropriate processes and standards across the organization
Maintain, review, propose and implement improvements to existing infrastructure, tools and processes

Qualifications:

Tinkerer– you love to try out new tools and technologies to further improve the platform.
Technology Toolbox– you have all of the tools for development plus a few extras.
Leader– you have the ability to keep pace with, and set pace for, your teammates. Able to learn and teach new technologies and solutions.
Solutions Driven– experience thinking out loud to create the best solutions to complex, tricky problems, using the latest technical methodologies/processes.
Global Thinker – you have the passion to deploy a service that is truly global and love the chance to solve complex problems that arise from this.

Requirements:

3+ years experience in DevOps processes and tools (Ansible, Docker, Vagrant, Chef/Puppet, PagerDuty, NewRelic, Splunk)
Expert knowledge in AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, ELB, ElasticCache, VPC, VPN, EMR, CloudDeploy, Kinesis, Redshift)
Proficiency in Cloud and Application Security, and Certification (ISO-27001, SOC 1, SOC 2)
Degree in Computer Science and/or Math
Proficiency in Agile development process
Excellent ability to communicate and collaborate with a globally distributed team
Bonus: Certifications in Cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Preferred skills & experience:

Highly motivated and self-disciplined.
Strong Computer Science fundamentals.
Excellent ability to prioritize and communicate in a fast-paced environment.

21). Senior SDET

SDET is responsible for tools, frameworks and automated tests coverage across our entire stack. SDET delivers tools and frameworks to automate and speed up test and release process. By making automation an early and integral part of SDLC, you will enable Tala to move towards CI/CD process.

This is an individual contributor role within Tala’s engineering track. You will report to the Release Manager and collaborate cross-functionally with all Tala teams across the globe.

What You’ll Do:

Expand backend automation coverage to all our microservices and integrate it into regression and release process
Deliver framework for performance testing to be used on demand and as part of regular testing
Deliver tools to help test integration with 3rd party services (Payment Rails, SMS/Email, KYC (know your customer), Analytics, etc.)
Integrate automated tests execution into the software development process
Support and collaborate with cross functional teams (Product, Data, Credit, and Business Development) in identifying automation areas to further increase the quality of our product
Maintain, review, propose and implement improvements to existing frameworks, tools and processes

What You Need:

Experience building test automation (Java/Groovy/Kotlin/Python, Jenkins, Shell Scripting, Linux, Mac OS) for either backend or frontend services
Experience with BDD testing paradigm
Excellent ability to communicate and collaborate with a globally distributed team
Experience working in Agile development process (Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban)
Preferred BS Degree in Computer Science and/or Math or equivalent skills

Major Projects You Will Work On:

Test automation for all Atlas related components on both frontend and backend
Rapidly execute large number of tests both on scheduled cadence and on demand
Integrate automation with CI/CD pipeline for immediate and automatic quality feedback for developers’ code changed
Integrate test reporting into one dashboard representing test results for all supported countries, components and environments in one centralized place
Performance testing
Working with QA Architect on designing and building tools and frameworks for test automation to support Tala’s growth and expansion

22). Senior Project Manager

Tala is looking for a highly motivated Senior Project Manager to Drive high performance of teams by building strong lines of communication across and our global offices. Tala is a world leader in providing direct loans and financial services in emerging markets. We are a global team with diverse backgrounds who are singularly focused on using technology, data, and a customer-centric approach to meet the financial needs of the 3+ billion people of the emerging global middle class.

The Senior Project Manager will report to the Program Management Lead and will be responsible for Support the delivery of products and initiatives using Agile practices. Successful candidates will have a deep expertise in Agile methodologies and have a background managing technical programs.

Responsibilities:

Support the delivery of products and initiatives using Agile practices and by serving as ScrumMaster for assigned teams.
Participate in quarterly OKR planning and monthly scoring for the KE team as well as continuous reporting and unblocking.
Organize roadmaps, timelines and review meetings for broad consumption
Support a culture of continuous learning through the establishment of consistent retros, post-mortems, and team health metrics
Provide input into resource planning and allocation in coordination with the PMO lead.
Develop a strong understanding of context (across markets) of our internal tools to optimize for efficiency, productivity, and team morale.
Be the team champion to ensure team alignment, advocate product and be the subject matter expert for our internal tools.

Requirements:

2-3 years of Program Management experience with proven expertise in Agile methodologies, concepts, practices, and standards
2+ years experience leveraging software development and team collaboration tools like JIRA, Confluence, Smartsheet, etc
Experience managing technical programs and projects for distributed teams across multiple locations and countries
Proven ability to coach and mentor others who are learning project management and Agile practices in a replicable, scalable way
Flexibility to respond to changing requirements and juggle multiple responsibilities
Checked ego, humble, empathetic, collaborative, service-oriented attitude of “customer first”.
Global travel may be required

23). Staff Accountant

Tala’s mission is to improve the financial lives of millions of people in developing markets by creating new, accessible financial services to allow for stronger financial access, choice, and control for our customers. We are quickly growing within our markets, and we are looking for a hands-on and highly motivated Staff Accountant to join us.

Responsibilities:

Assist with all aspects of Tala’s US accounting function – including, but is not limited to: the company’s consolidated financial statements, general ledger, portfolio accounting, accounts payable, reconciliation of balance sheet accounts, budgeting, tax compliance, and various special analyses or projects.
Build and maintain adequate and effective processes to improve the close and reporting cycles to ensure timely and accurate reporting.
Responsible for handling incoming invoices, obtaining necessary approvals, and facilitating payments to vendors.
Adhere to corporate policies and procedures such as invoice processing, cash management, and expense policies.
Ad Hoc projects as they arise, we are a start-up after all!

Requirements:

Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, or a related field.
1+ years experience in the accounting and finance sector.
CPA or CPA candidate, or equivalent.
Strong understanding of US GAAP
Exceptional work ethic and integrity.

Preferred Requirements:

Experience with Netsuite and/or SQL
Experience in public accounting
Experience working in consumer finance
Experience working with US GAAP / IFRS reporting
Ability to manage time around prioritized tasks, organize open items, and maintain open communication

Good luck.

Open job opportunities at TALA mobile loans lender company; Requirements and application procedure

ByHillary Kangwana

Responsibilities:

Requirements:

This Job Uniquely Offers:

Global Head of Talent Acquisition

About you:

What you’ll do:

Deliver on Recruitment Activities

Leverage Data and Innovation to Get Results

Build Organizational Capability

By Hillary Kangwana

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