Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer
Posted Updated
- Cardless engineers build the infrastructure behind modern credit cards, and backend engineers work on every layer of it: underwriting decisions, ledgers that have to balance to the cent, payment flows, rewards, risk controls, and the APIs our partners build on
- We don’t put people in narrow lanes. In a given quarter, you might ship a capability a partner needs before launch day, take a system that works today and make it hold up at ten times the load, or design the foundation for a product line that doesn’t exist yet
- Most fintech backend jobs mean inheriting a mature system and keeping it running. This is your chance to define the system
- Over the next few years we’re expanding into new verticals, turning a single-partner platform into a multi-partner one, and replacing infrastructure we rent with infrastructure we own
- Those decisions are being made now, and the engineers who join now will make them
- You’ll own meaningful pieces of the platform from the start and understand how money moves through a card program from application to statement
- You’ll also work with a team that treats correctness as a craft
- Engineers who want their work to shape what a company becomes, rather than just keep it running, will find few roles like it
- Design and build backend systems that move real money, make credit decisions, and serve hundreds of thousands of cardholders
- Take projects from ambiguity to production: scoping, design, implementation, testing, rollout, and the operational life that follows
- Work across domains rather than inside a single service, going where the highest-value problem is
- Partner with product, risk, compliance, operations, and our partner and vendor counterparts to ship things that hold up in a regulated environment
- Improve reliability, observability, and developer experience as you go, and leave each system better than you found it
- How the role grows with level:
- Mid-level: You own well-scoped features and services end to end, and you get faster at handling ambiguity with support from senior engineers
- Senior: You own large, ambiguous projects from design through operation, set the technical approach for your area, and raise the bar for the engineers around you
- Staff: You set technical direction across domains. That means deciding how the platform scales to many partners, what we build in-house and in what order, and how the core ledger and payments architecture evolves. You shape the decisions other engineers build on
Benefits
- 💸 Competitive salaries, equity, and a 401(k) plan
- 🏥 Top-of-the-line healthcare (medical, vision, and dental), with 100% primary coverage and 75% dependent coverage for medical
- 🌴 Unlimited paid time off, with a minimum of 15 days off per year
- 👶 Parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents
- ✈️ Team trips & offsites
- For in-office employees:
- 🍱 Catered lunch at the office every day, plus plenty of snacks & drinks
- 🚎 $250/month commuter assistance for public transit or our parking garage
- For remote employees:
- 🖥️ $500 remote setup stipend to help you do your best work
- We hire for judgment and range. Engineers who reason well about complex systems pick up the domain quickly
- Prior experience in payments or lending is a meaningful advantage, but we’d rather bet on how you think than on what’s already on your résumé
- Experience building and operating production backend services, with a track record of shipping projects end to end
- Solid fundamentals in distributed systems, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
- Clear communication and genuine care about correctness. A bug here means someone’s card declines at the grocery store or their credit report is wrong
- Proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem. We are primarily Java with Python for data work, and we do not expect you to have used ours
- Strong systems thinking and problem solving. You can reason about an unfamiliar system, find where it breaks, and make a sound call with incomplete information
- Fintech, payments, lending, or card issuing experience: authorization, ledgers, settlement, reconciliation, disputes, or regulatory work
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Step Functions) or event streaming
- You’ve built and maintained external, partner-facing APIs
