Fractional Engineering Lead

Location: Remote, with working hours that overlap CET and West and East Africa time zones

Employment type: Part-time, around 20 hours a week, with a path to full-time

Department: Engineering

About Partna

Partna is stablecoin payment infrastructure for Africa. Businesses use our API to collect, convert and settle money between African currencies and global markets: onramp and offramp between local currency and stablecoins, and local collections settled in USD or stablecoins.

We are backed by Y Combinator (W22) and live in Nigeria. We process more than 200,000 transactions a month at a 99% success rate, with more than $250M in cumulative volume.

The role

The hard part of our work is not the stablecoin side. It is the last mile: moving money reliably between local payment systems and blockchains. We have a small engineering team shipping Go services that do this.

This role is not about writing code. You will help us design features before they are built, review how they are implemented, and guide the team through delivery. Your measure of success is how much better the engineering team is when you are done: better designs, fewer production issues, faster and safer delivery, and engineers who have grown under your guidance.

The role starts part-time at around 20 hours a week, spread across the working week, with the opportunity to move to full-time as the company grows.

Responsibilities

• Work with product and engineering to design features before implementation: system design, data models, failure modes and trade-offs.
• Review technical plans and pull requests for correctness, security and maintainability, with constructive, actionable feedback.
• Guide engineers through implementation of complex work, unblocking them and helping them make sound decisions.
• Raise the bar on transaction correctness: idempotency, retries, reconciliation, and clear handling of failed or partial payments.
• Establish and improve engineering practices: testing, code review, monitoring, alerting, incident response and deployment.
• Help diagnose difficult production issues and turn them into lasting fixes and lessons.
• Mentor engineers through regular feedback, pairing on design and sharing knowledge.
• Document the important architectural decisions and the reasoning behind them.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including technical leadership of a team.
• Deep experience with production Go.
• Experience designing and operating production systems in fintech or payments.
• Strong system design and architecture skills for APIs and distributed systems.
• A track record of making engineering teams better: improving practices, mentoring engineers, and leading through review and design rather than by writing all the code.
• Understanding of application security and secure development practices, including handling of keys and secrets.
• Precision with the math of money: decimal handling, currency conversion, fees and balance reconciliation.
• Clear written and verbal communication, especially in design documents and code review.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with blockchain systems in production, such as wallet management, on-chain transaction handling, node or RPC integrations, or smart contract interaction.
• Experience with stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, or with payments in African markets.
• Experience at an early-stage startup, or as a fractional or advisory engineering lead.
• Experience with observability tools for logs, metrics and tracing.
• Experience improving legacy systems incrementally.
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.

What we offer

• Flexible working arrangements.
• High leverage: direct influence over how a payments engineering team designs, builds and operates systems that move real money.
• A path to a full-time role.

Interview process

1. CV review.
2. Introductory conversation: role expectations, time commitment and mutual fit.
3. Technical discussion: a system design conversation and a review of real engineering work with us.
4. Offer and references, where applicable.

We aim to complete the process within one week and will explain what to expect before each stage.