Careers
Build the infrastructure the next generation of African businesses runs on.
Small team, serious problem. Payments, multi-currency money and merchant operations — for a market that has been underserved by tooling built somewhere else.
Why here
The problem is real and the surface is large.
Most financial tooling used by African businesses was designed for a different market and adapted afterwards. Bank transfer gets treated as an edge case. Multi-currency means opening a second account somewhere else. Verification is bolted on.
NorthPole is being built the other way around — transfer-first, multi-currency from the data model up, verification handled once at onboarding. That means the foundational decisions are still being made, and the people who join now make them.
It also means the work is unglamorous in the places that matter: settlement maths, idempotency, reconciliation, failure states. If that sounds like the interesting part to you, we should talk.
Teams
Where we hire.
These are the disciplines NorthPole is built out of. If your work fits one of them, write to us — we read everything that comes in.
Engineering
Backend services that move money, the API surface businesses build on, and the web and mobile clients on top of it.
- Backend & payments
- API platform
- Web & mobile
Design
Product and brand design. Making financial complexity legible is the hardest and most valuable work here.
- Product design
- Design systems
- Brand
Compliance & Risk
KYC, AML, partner relationships and fraud. The function that makes everything else possible to operate legally.
- Compliance
- Fraud & risk
- Partner operations
Operations & Support
Merchant onboarding, settlement operations and the support that answers a business when money is involved.
- Customer success
- Settlement ops
- Support
We do not keep a permanent list of open roles on this page — a stale vacancy wastes your time. Current openings are shared directly when they are live. A speculative application to careers@northpoletradelink.net is genuinely the best route in.
What we look for
How we work together.
- 01
Care about correctness
This is people's income. We would rather ship a week later than ship a rounding error into a settlement calculation.
- 02
Write things down
Decisions, trade-offs and failure modes get documented. We are building something that has to outlive the memory of whoever built it.
- 03
Understand the market
Or want to. Building payments for Nigeria means knowing why bank transfer dominates and why a screenshot is not proof of payment.
- 04
Own the outcome
Not the ticket. If the thing you shipped is confusing to a merchant, that is still yours to fix.
- 05
Say the hard thing early
A concern raised before launch is a contribution. The same concern raised after is a post-mortem.
- 06
Work in the open
Progress, blockers and mistakes are shared. Nobody should have to ask what state something is in.
Hiring
Four conversations, no surprises.
You will know where you stand at each stage, and you will get a reason either way.
- 1
Introduction
A conversation about what you have built and what you are looking for. No take-home yet, no panel.
- 2
Craft conversation
A working session on a real problem in your discipline. We discuss trade-offs rather than test recall.
- 3
Team conversation
Meet the people you would work with day to day, and ask them anything. This runs both ways.
- 4
Offer & references
We tell you what we can offer and why. If it is a no at any stage, you hear the reason.
No formal opening that fits? Write anyway.
Tell us what you have built and what you want to build next. Links to real work — a repo, a product, a case study — say more than a CV does.
Not looking to join, but want to build on NorthPole?
The platform is open to anyone. Create an account and explore test mode.