
OAK'S LAB · Europe
**This is a remote position open to candidates in Europe. For those based in the Czech Republic, a hybrid work model is also available. ABOUT US We are a l...
available.
We are a leading product development partner specializing in custom web and mobile application development. With Silicon Valley
founders and top-tier European tech talent, we operate from Prague and have successfully delivered over 65 software products for
early-stage startups, scaleups, and global enterprises.
At OAK’S LAB, we take an AI-first approach, utilizing AI on almost every project. From streamlining design and testing workflows
to enhancing developer productivity, our teams leverage tools such as Figma MCP Server, Playwright MCP Server, and Cursor, and
we’re actively experimenting with remote AI agents to push the boundaries of what’s possible in product development.
Our product development team is looking for a Senior Fullstack Engineer who combines creative thinking, exceptional
problem-solving skills, and technical expertise to build outstanding web and mobile applications for our clients.
You’ll play a key part in building and scaling impactful digital products from the ground up. You’ll work as part of a dedicated
product team alongside a Tech Lead, Product Manager, Designer, and a talented group of engineers, driving the success of
innovative companies. Your role will involve everything from participating in high-level technical discussions to engineering and
deploying complex features, giving you full ownership across the entire product development lifecycle.
For ambitious engineers, we’ll provide the time, mentorship, and opportunities to step into a leadership role, where you can guide
and mentor your own team over the longer term. You’ll also have the opportunity to join our internal AI Guild, a community where
engineers share insights, experiment with cutting-edge AI tools, and learn from one another.
stakeholders
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associated with OAK'S LAB. We will never ask for payment information or banking details via email, phone, or any other
communication channel during the interview process. If you receive messages using our name, domain, or brand assets in an attempt
to impersonate us or act on our behalf, do not engage. Instead, report it to Econsumer.gov at Government Shutdown Notice / Aviso
de cierre del gobierno (if you are in the EU), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at Government Shutdown Notice / Aviso de cierre del
gobierno , or the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in case of investment fraud at SEC.gov | Report Suspected Securities
Fraud or Wrongdoing (if you are in the US).
ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a senior engineer to help shape and lead the platform that other engineering teams build on top of. Our mission is to make AI agents and high-throughput backend systems easy for internal teams to adopt, and you'll own significant parts of how that platform is designed: the reusable libraries, Spring Boot starters, templates, and supporting tooling that the whole company depends on. You'll work across two worlds: * Agentic frameworks: the libraries, starters, and orchestration patterns that internal teams use to ship LLM-powered agents (Python/LangChain/LangGraph on the agent side, Kotlin/Spring Boot on the platform side), plus the supporting frameworks (evaluations, guardrails) that prove those agents actually work. * Core backend platform: Kotlin services and libraries and the shared building blocks other teams depend on. This is a high-leverage, builder-and-multiplier role. You'll make foundational design decisions, set the patterns and standards other engineers follow, and raise the bar for everyone building on the platform. Because the foundations you create sit underneath many teams' work, understanding how the company fits together, its products, domains, and the teams behind them is central to doing it well. While AI development experience is a great plus, we are looking for someone with genuine enthusiasm for the field, someone ready to dive deep into agentic systems and become our go-to expert. WHAT YOU'LL DO * Own the design of shared libraries, Spring Boot starters, and templates while making the architecture, API, and trade-off decisions that determine how easily internal teams ship on top of them. * Set the patterns and standards for our agentic frameworks, agent orchestration, tool use, memory, and the surrounding plumbing (message routing, human-in-the-loop workflows, MCP integration), and bring teams along with them. * Mentor and upskill product teams in Python-based AI agent development, including hands-on guidance with the LangChain and LangGraph frameworks. * Lead the evaluation and guardrail strategy so we can measure agent quality, reliability, and regressions. * Drive technical work across our Kotlin/Spring Boot platform and the client libraries that wrap it. * Build and maintain a clear map of the wider ecosystem (how our systems, domains, and teams connect) and use it to make foundational decisions that fit real needs across the company. * Drive adoption and multiply other engineers. Mentor teammates, review designs and code, run the docs/examples that turn a good framework into one that teams actually choose, and feed what you learn back into the platform. * Set the research direction in unfamiliar territory: identify where to invest, prototype the promising approaches, and turn the winners into production-ready foundations the rest of the org can rely on. * Raise the bar on developer experience, clear APIs, good defaults, useful errors, and documentation people actually read, and hold the platform to it. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR * 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including a track record of building libraries, frameworks, or platform components that other engineers built on. * Deep experience with Kotlin / the JVM and Spring Boot, and strong instincts for API and library design. You know what makes a foundation pleasant to build on versus painful. * Demonstrated technical leadership: you set direction, make and justify architectural trade-offs, and lift the engineers around you, with or without formal authority. * Genuine drive to lead on agentic AI and its surrounding tooling (frameworks, evaluation, guardrails, orchestration), and to become a go-to expert for the org. * The judgment to drive ambiguity to clarity: to take an open-ended or unfamiliar problem and turn it into a sound, well-scoped design others can execute. * A systems thinker who owns the bigger picture: you actively understand how the company's products, domains, and teams connect, and design for the whole, not just the module in front of you. * Excellent communication and a self-sufficient way of gathering context: you do your homework, ask sharp questions of the right people, and can explain and sell technical directions to both engineers and stakeholders. * Pragmatism about Python: Working knowledge of Python: You don’t need an extensive background in managing large-scale Python production environments, but you should be comfortable with the language. Since our tooling relies on Python/LangChain/LangGraph, we look for the ability to ramp up quickly and act as a senior lead across both our Kotlin and Python stacks NICE TO HAVE * Strong distributed systems background like messaging/queues (SQS, Redis), gRPC, event-driven architectures, including the failure modes and operational realities. * Cloud experience (AWS preferred) and infrastructure-as-code. * Experience growing a platform/DevEx practice by establishing standards, golden paths, and adoption across multiple teams. * Contributions to or maintenance of open-source libraries or frameworks. * Hands-on experience with LLMs, LangChain/LangGraph, or other agent frameworks. * Experience defining evaluation / experiment-tracking / observability strategy for ML or agent systems (e.g. Langfuse, MLflow, or similar).
GROWE WELCOMES THOSE WHO ARE EXCITED TO: * Design, build, and maintain backend services using .NET (C#); * Develop and evolve microservices in a production environment; * Support existing functionality and ensure backward compatibility of releases; * Participate in task analysis, decomposition, and effort estimation; * Deliver completed tasks for testing and collaborate with QA during test phases; * Build integrations using asynchronous communication and event-driven patterns; * Work with AI integrations; * Identify performance bottlenecks and contribute to system design improvements; * Contribute to service observability (logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, monitoring); * Manage deployment configurations and manifests in Kubernetes environments; * Work in a GitOps setup and participate in deployment and operational ownership; * Collaborate with DevOps teams on infrastructure-related changes (including Terraform workflows); * Participate in on-call rotation and handle production incidents; * Identify technical debt and propose improvements; * Perform high-quality code reviews focusing on maintainability, performance, and consistency. WE NEED YOUR PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: * 5+ years of commercial backend development experience with C# / .NET, .NET Core / ASP.NET Core; * 1+ year of experience with Java; * Solid understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems; * Experience with asynchronous communication and event-driven architectures; * Experience with message brokers (Kafka or similar); * Strong experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL, including query optimization, indexing, performance tuning, and data modelling; * Experience writing Unit and Integration tests; * Good understanding of software design principles (SOLID, separation of concerns, testability); * Understanding of observability and monitoring in production systems; * Experience troubleshooting performance and memory issues; * Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform will be a plus; * Experience with Prometheus, Loki, Tempo will be a plus; * Readiness to work with Java-based Kafka collectors/services containing business logic will be a strong plus; * Experience with AI integrations, LLM-based solutions, or GenAI-related tooling will be considered an important advantage. WE APPRECIATE IF YOU HAVE THOSE PERSONAL FEATURES: * Strive to learn new technologies/languages to solve non-standard challenges; * Good communication skills; * Multitasking, quick task execution; * Good team player; * Responsibility. WE ARE SEEKING THOSE WHO ALIGN WITH OUR CORE VALUES: * GROWE TOGETHER: Our team is our main asset. We work together and support each other to achieve our common goals; * DRIVE RESULT OVER PROCESS: We set ambitious, clear, measurable goals in line with our strategy and driving Growe to success; * BE READY FOR CHANGE: We see challenges as opportunities to grow and evolve. We adapt today to win tomorrow.
Who is PawaPay PawaPay is a pan-African fintech enabling local payment channels used by the mass market to both local and international merchants. We operate in a highly regulated, partner-driven environment and are in scale-up mode, with ambitious growth plans across multiple African markets. Our vision is to simplify business for companies and consumers in Africa and we do that by ensuring that payments simply work, at scale, despite fragmentation and complexity that exists on the Continent. Through our payments API we already facilitate over 4 million transactions a day across 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. We are the largest PSP on the Continent for the processing of mobile money payments, and have positioned ourselves well to lead the payment space as it grows over the next decade. At PawaPay, there is an entrepreneurial spirit coupled with a modern and professional working culture. The fast-paced, ever-changing environment will suit someone who can adapt and think on their feet. In return, you will have the opportunity to work alongside a group of dedicated and smart individuals working towards the same mission. We work as a remote team and have team members in Europe, Africa and Asia. THE ROLE We are looking for a Head of Merchant Experience to build and lead a new Merchant Experience (MX) function within Product. This is a senior product leadership role responsible for every stage of the merchant journey — from a merchant's first interaction with pawaPay through onboarding, integration, live operations and long-term growth. Today, many parts of the merchant experience are owned by different teams across the business. Your mission is to bring those experiences together into a single, coherent strategy, roadmap and operating model. You'll lead a multidisciplinary team spanning product, design, engineering, AI and QA, working closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Operations and Customer Success to make pawaPay the easiest payments platform in Africa to discover, integrate and operate. As AI increasingly changes how software is built and consumed, you'll also help shape experiences that work equally well for human users and the AI-powered tools and agents that increasingly interact with payment infrastructure. WHAT YOU'LL DO Build and lead the Merchant Experience function * Define the vision, strategy and roadmap for MX as a new product discipline. * Hire and lead a high-performing team across product, design, engineering and AI. * Establish the operating rhythms, metrics and accountability structures that make the function run. * Create a single MX scorecard that gives the business clear, consistent visibility into merchant health. Own the merchant journey end-to-end * Take full ownership of the merchant lifecycle: discovery, onboarding, integration, live operations, growth and expansion. * Drive measurable improvements in activation, adoption, engagement and retention. * Identify and eliminate friction at every stage of the journey. * Partner closely with Marketing, Sales and Operations so that no merchant falls through the cracks. Build product experiences merchants actually love * Lead the evolution of the merchant dashboard, onboarding flows, documentation and support experience. * Champion quality, usability and design that respects the merchant's time and intelligence. * Push self-serve as a first principle — without sacrificing the quality of support when it's needed. * Partner with Engineering to raise the bar on developer experience, APIs and integration workflows. Use AI where it genuinely matters * Identify high-leverage opportunities to apply AI across onboarding, support, analytics and merchant productivity. * Help define what world-class AI-enabled merchant experiences look like in the payments context. * Ensure AI-powered experiences are trustworthy, measurable and built for the regulatory environments we operate in. * Think ahead: how will agent-driven interactions with payment infrastructure reshape the merchant relationship? Deliver outcomes the business can measure * Reduce time-to-value for new merchants. * Improve onboarding completion and activation rates. * Drive deeper product adoption across the merchant base. * Reduce support volume and cost-to-serve. * Build the kind of merchant satisfaction that turns into retention and advocacy. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Required * 10+ years across Product, Customer Experience, Platform or Digital Product leadership. * 4+ years leading multidisciplinary teams. * A proven track record of improving customer or user experiences at real scale. * Experience owning commercial outcomes — activation, retention, conversion, cost-to-serve. * Strong product and technology fluency; you can go deep with engineering when it counts. * Excellent communicator, written and verbal. * Comfortable with ambiguity and energised by the challenge of building something new. Nice to Have * Experience in payments, fintech or developer platforms. * A background building AI-enabled products or workflows. * B2B SaaS or infrastructure experience. * Exposure to African markets or emerging-market technology businesses. * Experience scaling teams and functions through rapid growth. Why PawaPay? * Help improve financial access in Africa * Being part of an amazing team that shapes company’s culture as a great place to be * An ambitious, talented, and diverse team who always has your back * We grow fast, and you will grow fast with us * Competitive remuneration * 35 days of paid leave per year (inclusive of public holidays) and more.