DevOps Engineering Manager

Lean is expanding our footprint by opening an office in Egypt this summer, and the DevOps Engineering Manager role is one of our first hires in the market.

 

We’re a Series B fintech (General Catalyst and Sequoia backed), and over the last few years, we have grown from a category-defining open banking company into a multi-rail infrastructure layer powering payments, data, and lending across MENA.

 

Cairo is a long-term play on a market we believe in, and the people who join now will shape what Lean looks like there for years to come. You will be working alongside a very diverse team of 30+ nationalities, with backgrounds from some of the best fintechs in the region and globally. The work is hard, the standards are high, and the ownership is real. If you are a builder who wants to set the standard, this is the right moment to join.

 

About the Job

We're looking for a deeply technical Engineering Manager to lead our DevOps team, reporting to the Head of DevOps.

 

Our DevOps team covers a broad scope - SRE, Platform Engineering, Automation, DevSecOps - and we welcome candidates from any of these backgrounds. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role combining technical leadership with strong people skills. You'll stay close to our infrastructure, architecture and production systems and be comfortable moving between coaching engineers, reviewing designs and troubleshooting complex production issues.

 

You'll translate Lean's DevOps strategy into execution - partnering with the Head of DevOps to shape priorities and deliver the roadmap - while driving engineering quality and technical standards across the team. You'll play a key role in strengthening the reliability, resilience and scalability of Lean's production infrastructure as we continue to grow across products and markets and adopting AI.

AI-assisted engineering is an important part of how we work. Claude Code is part of our standard engineering toolchain, and we expect engineering leaders to use AI effectively while remaining accountable for the quality of what ships.

About Lean

 

Lean is the leading financial infrastructure provider in the Middle East. We power some of the region’s largest companies with APIs that enable payments, account verification, financial data access, and other critical financial infrastructure.

 

What started as the region’s pioneering Open Banking platform and quickly became the de facto leader in account aggregation and payment initiation in the region is now becoming something bigger: a multi-product infrastructure company powering payments, data, and lending across MENA.

 

We’ve processed billions of dollars in transactions. We’re trusted by 350+ clients - from Binance and Careem to Etisalat - and backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Shorooq. Our $67.5M Series B was just the beginning. We’re expanding into new markets, opening offices, acquiring businesses, and building capabilities that didn’t exist here before.

 

Responsibilities

• Drive delivery. Translate DevOps priorities into execution, remove blockers, surface risks early and help ensure high-quality delivery.

• Lead technical design. Drive design reviews across infrastructure, reliability and platform engineering, partnering with the Head of DevOps on broader architectural decisions.

• Own the DR programme. Take ownership of a live Disaster Recovery programme: plan and coordinate recurring DR exercises across environments and markets, coordinate execution with regional teams, and drive continuous improvement of RPO/RTO.

• Stay hands-on. Review infrastructure changes and code, troubleshoot production systems, prototype solutions and get directly involved when technical depth is required.

• Improve operational discipline. Strengthen observability, incident response, postmortems, SLOs, capacity planning and production readiness.

• Support and grow the team. Coach engineers, raise engineering standards, take an active role in hiring, own onboarding, and help create an environment where the team can perform at its best.

• Automate by default. Champion Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, CI/CD and self-service tooling to reduce manual operations.

• Embed security and compliance. Partner with Security and Compliance to meet regulatory, audit and governance requirements across Lean's markets.

• Use AI effectively. Help the team use agentic coding tools responsibly to improve engineering quality and velocity.

Qualifications

Our interview process assesses these areas directly.

• 8+ years across DevOps, Infrastructure, SRE or Platform Engineering, including time leading engineers as a team lead or Engineering Manager.

• Deep Linux and networking fundamentals: processes, memory, storage, TCP/IP, DNS and routing.

• Kubernetes in production: design, operations and troubleshooting.

• Infrastructure as Code as your default way of working: Terraform, Pulumi (or equivalent), CI/CD and GitOps.

• Production experience with at least one major cloud platform - OCI or GCP preferred, AWS also fine.

• You read, write and review code in languages such as Python, Go or Bash, including judging AI-generated changes. The interview process includes a short practical exercise.

• System design fundamentals: distributed systems, high availability, failure modes, Disaster Recovery, capacity and cost.

• Production troubleshooting depth: comfortable investigating processes, resource usage, network connections, logs, environment variables and application behaviour rather than relying only on dashboards.

• Experience with observability and incident response; you write clear postmortems and drive the fixes that follow.

• Comfortable joining an on-call and escalation rotation.

• Clear communication, coaching and stakeholder management.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience in fintech, payments or another regulated technology environment.

• Experience operating infrastructure across multiple regions, clouds or markets.

• Experience building developer platforms or self-service infrastructure.

• Familiarity with technologies such as ArgoCD, Vault, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB or Cloudflare.

• Experience helping establish or grow an engineering team in a new market or office.

• Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools as a core part of your workflow (we run on Claude Code), with the judgment to know when to trust their output and when to scrutinies it more closely.

 

NB. While we think the above experience could be important, we’re keen to hear from people that believe they have valuable experience to bring to the role. If you identify with the team and mission, but not all of our requirements, then please still apply!!

Why Join us?

We’re building the financial infrastructure for MENA. Not as a slogan, as a fact.

Since 2019, we’ve become the first regulated Open Banking and Open Finance company operating across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We’ve processed billions of dollars. We connect millions of accounts. We enable companies like Binance, Careem, and Etisalat to build products that were previously impossible in this region.

Our recent $67.5M Series B from General Catalyst and Sequoia isn’t just validation: it’s fuel. We’re expanding into new markets, launching new products, and setting the pace for what financial innovation looks like in MENA.

We solve hard problems. We move fast. We hold ourselves to a high standard. And we’re looking for people who’ve done this before to help us do it right.

If you’re motivated by building something that lasts, not just something that scales, Lean is where you need to be.

Not only do we offer competitive salaries, private healthcare, and flexible office hours, but we also insist that every member of the team hold a meaningful equity stake in the business to ensure long-term alignment. We'd love you to join us for this journey!

Lean is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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