Principal Software Engineer, Avant
Originations
$140-195k
+ Annual bonus
M, T, Th in-office
3 days a week in office ( Merchandise Mart, Downtown Chicago)
Personal credit FinTech
Be an early applicant
Personal credit FinTech
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$140-195k
+ Annual bonus
M, T, Th in-office
3 days a week in office ( Merchandise Mart, Downtown Chicago)
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower every customer with innovative solutions designed to help them reach their goals.
Role
Who you are
- 8–12 years of professional software engineering experience with proven success in complex, full-stack environments
- Deep expertise in at least one backend language (e.g., Ruby, Python, or equivalent), along with experience with modern frontend frameworks (React preferred)
- Strong database design and scaling experience (Postgres, MySQL, or equivalent)
- Strong DevOps fluency (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, or similar) in cloud-native environments
- Comfort navigating ambiguous technical problems and proposing clear, actionable solutions
- Proven experience driving architectural decisions and delivering systems at scale
- Exceptional communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience working within Agile Scrum teams
- A mindset that values engineering craftsmanship, team collaboration, and long-term impact over short-term hacks. We believe in
- The value of your work and its long-term impact on our company
Desirable
- Experience in fintech, payments, or regulated industries
- Hands-on with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or Kafka
- Prior experience mentoring engineers at scale or shaping engineering culture
What the job involves
- Avant is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the future of our financial technology platform
- In this role, you’ll tackle complex system challenges at scale, influence technical strategy across teams, and build solutions that directly impact millions of customers. You’ll work across backend, frontend, and infrastructure layers, driving innovation in a fast-moving, high-impact environment
- As a senior individual contributor, you’ll set the technical direction, drive cross-team initiatives, and mentor others without direct reports. You’ll have broad autonomy, the authority to influence decisions, and the responsibility to ensure execution at a high standard
- You'll architect and evolve systems that handle high scale and high availability
- Set engineering standards for reliability, security, and performance
- Drive alignment across multiple teams by making tradeoffs visible and rallying others to the best path forward
- Drive the design and delivery of large-scale, mission-critical systems that cut across teams and domains
- Serve as a technical leader across backend services and frontend applications, defining patterns others follow
- Lead key system design efforts, ensuring long-term scalability, maintainability, and performance
- Collaborate with product managers and business stakeholders to balance short-term product goals with long-term engineering health. You know when to push back and when to lean in
- Shape technical strategy in environments where solutions are not pre-defined
- Influence engineers, managers, and executives through technical expertise, clear communication, and well-reasoned proposals
- Ensure technical excellence while pragmatically meeting business needs, making tradeoffs visible and intentional
- Support and mentor engineers across the org through pairing, pull request reviews, and design reviews
Our take
Many Americans with below average credit scores are caught in a bind: they're unable to improve their score, and simultaneously cannot access traditional loans. Avant's alternative is to offer credit options that are powered by machine learning and based upon a large database that helps to manage risk.
For its users, the company offers a quick credit decision and speedy access to any allotted funds. It has issued over $8 billion in loans to date, and has also expanded its business through the acquisitions of ReadyForZero in 2015 and Zero Financial in 2021.
This expansion has enabled Avant to reach towards its goal of offering a whole suite of products in a single platform, such as loans, credit cards, and deposits. Although there are many FinTechs looking at ways to remove the barriers that people with low credit scores face when trying to take out loans, this expansion to banking products should help Avant to stand out.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2022
$125m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Sep 2015
$325m
SERIES E
Total funding: $779m
Company benefits
- Choice of great medical, dental, and vision insurance plan options
- 401(k) Match
- Unlimited paid time off
- Flexible work environment
- Generous paid parental leave
- Lunch allowance (Fooda) and in-office snacks
- WFH stipends for our remote employees
- Access to LinkedIn Learning for professional development
- No meeting wednesdays - (a.k.a. planned time to Get Sh!t Done)
- Summer fridays
- Fun in-office and virtual social events
- (And who doesn’t love the swag)
Company HQ
River North, Chicago, IL
Leadership
Al Goldstein
(Co-Founder & Executive Chair)They worked for a year at Deutsche Bank before founding Pangea Properties in 2008, and Avant in 2013. They have been Chair since, alongside founding Amount, Spring Labs, and StoicLane.
Paul Zhang
(Co-Founder & CIO)Having studied at the University of Illinois, they spent a year as a Software Engineer at CashNetUSA and Enova Financial. They founded Debteye in 2011, before starting Avant in 2013, serving first as CTO then Chief Architect, CTO again and finally CIO.
Matthew Bochenek
(CEO)Has been with the business since 2013, working in a range of positions including Head of US Servicing, Head of Operations and COO - before becoming CEO in 2021. Previously spend a decade at Superfund Asset Management.
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