Senior Staff Software Engineer, Earnin
$279-341k
+ Equity
SQL
Kubernetes
TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
C#
Java
Kafka
Go
Kotlin
MySQL
Okta
REST API
DynamoDB
ChatGPT
Senior and Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area
2 days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)
Paycheck advance service for employees
Be an early applicant
Paycheck advance service for employees
501-1000 employees
FintechB2CB2BPersonal financePaymentsFinancial Services
Be an early applicant
$279-341k
+ Equity
SQL
Kubernetes
TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
C#
Java
Kafka
Go
Kotlin
MySQL
Okta
REST API
DynamoDB
ChatGPT
Senior and Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area
2 days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)
501-1000 employees
FintechB2CB2BPersonal financePaymentsFinancial Services
Company mission
To build a financial system that works for people.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated progression into Staff/Senior Staff-level technical leadership
- Proven track record defining and executing technical strategy for large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure
- Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and delivery across multiple engineering teams and organizational boundaries, without relying on direct authority
- Deep hands-on experience designing and operating secure, highly available distributed backend systems at scale
- Strong expertise across identity, trust, security, privacy, or regulated-data systems, ideally spanning both consumer and enterprise experiences
- Deep understanding of authentication and authorization protocols and patterns, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, identity federation, and token management
- Experience architecting one or more Trust domains such as KYC/identity verification, fraud or risk systems, PII tokenization, data vaults, encryption, secure document/file processing, identity resolution, or user deduplication
- Production experience with identity platforms such as Okta, Auth0, Keycloak, or comparable internally developed identity infrastructure
- Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript, with the ability to work effectively across language boundaries
- Deep experience with REST APIs, SQL/NoSQL data stores, Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms, Kubernetes, microservices, and event-driven architectures
- Strong operational instincts, including experience with SLOs, observability, incident response, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production reliability for critical systems
- Hands-on experience building AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including orchestration, tool use, evaluation, security boundaries, and guardrails
- Exceptional architectural judgment and the ability to simplify complex systems while balancing security, privacy, reliability, scalability, developer experience, regulatory requirements, and speed of execution
- Demonstrated ability to mentor senior technical talent and create leverage across an engineering organization
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, or similar tools) as part of your software development workflow
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical strategies to engineering, product, security, risk, and executive audiences
- Experience in FinTech, regulated industries, identity, fraud, privacy, security, or compliance-sensitive environments is strongly preferred
What the job involves
- We're looking for an exceptional Senior Staff Software Engineer to help define and evolve the Identity & Trust platform that enables secure, effortless access and trustworthy customer onboarding across EarnIn's expanding consumer and enterprise ecosystem
- This role spans identity, authentication, authorization, identity verification, privacy, data protection, secure document processing, user/entity resolution, and fraud prevention
- You'll architect foundational capabilities that are consumed across the company—from establishing that a customer is who they claim to be, to protecting their sensitive information, securely handling identity documents, and ensuring duplicate or abusive identities are detected and prevented
- As a Senior Staff Engineer, you'll operate at both a deep technical and organizational scale
- You'll shape multi-year platform strategy, lead architecture across multiple teams, solve ambiguous and high-impact technical problems, and establish engineering patterns that allow teams across EarnIn to build trusted customer experiences safely and quickly
- You'll also help define how AI and agentic engineering workflows can safely amplify engineering productivity, while establishing appropriate guardrails for security, privacy, correctness, and operational reliability
- Set Platform Strategy & Architecture: Define the technical vision, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for Identity & Trust, establishing scalable patterns across authentication, authorization, KYC/identity verification, PII protection, secure document processing, deduplication, and related trust capabilities
- Lead High-Impact Technical Initiatives: Drive complex, ambiguous initiatives spanning multiple services and teams—from problem definition and architecture through implementation, rollout, and long-term operation
- Build Secure, Resilient Infrastructure: Design highly available distributed systems and APIs using microservices, event-driven architectures, and technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, DynamoDB, and MySQL, with strong emphasis on security, privacy, reliability, and regulatory requirements
- Evolve Identity & Trust Capabilities: Architect solutions for OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, identity federation, KYC, PII tokenization, data vaulting, secure file ingest/scanning, and user/entity deduplication
- Create Organizational Leverage: Establish reusable architecture patterns, technical standards, APIs, documentation, and platform primitives that enable product teams to safely consume Identity & Trust capabilities without reinventing foundational security and compliance solutions
- Drive Operational Excellence: Set the bar for reliability, observability, SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production readiness across critical Trust infrastructure
- Advance AI-Powered Engineering: Lead the responsible adoption of agentic workflows and multi-agent systems to automate engineering, testing, debugging, operations, and analysis, with appropriate evaluation, security, and human-in-the-loop guardrails
- Multiply Engineering Talent: Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, influence technical direction across organizations, and raise the bar through architecture reviews, technical RFCs, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership
- Partner Across the Company: Work closely with Product, Security, Risk, Data Science, Design, Analytics, Infrastructure, Compliance, and executive stakeholders to translate customer, business, security, and regulatory needs into durable technical strategies
- WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE:
- Success in this role is measured by the technical leverage and trust infrastructure you create across EarnIn, not simply by the services you personally build
- You will help establish a cohesive Identity & Trust platform that makes it easier for every product team to build secure customer experiences
- You'll create durable architectural foundations for who a customer is, whether they can be trusted, what they can access, and how their most sensitive information is protected
- You'll anticipate scale, security, regulatory, and product challenges before they become organizational constraints; simplify fragmented capabilities into reusable platform primitives; and enable engineering teams to move faster without compromising trust or safety
- You'll operate comfortably from deep technical implementation to company-level strategy—diving into code and production systems when necessary, leading architecture across teams, mentoring senior technical leaders, and establishing technical direction for some of EarnIn's most critical foundational capabilities
Our take
Paying bills is an inevitable part of life, but paying them late or dipping into overdrafts can result in fees. This is the reality for millions of workers who have to wait for their paychecks to arrive – and the problem that companies like EarnIn are trying to solve. By allowing hourly workers access to their pay as it is earned rather than on a fixed date, it hopes to provide all Americans with the ability to deal with immediate costs without going into arrears.
Unlike competitors in this growing space, Earnin charges no mandatory fees, instead gaining revenue through a voluntary tipping system. It also requires no credit checks to access its services, which puts it ahead of the growing number of digital banking solutions. This approach has garnered it a strong user base of business customers who offer Earnin as an employee benefit.
Earnin has managed to continue its steady growth even while the wider tech landscape suffered setbacks, which suggests a wise leadership. It also continues to improve its offering and expand its network of businesses, aiming to give every employee in America control of the money they've earned.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
42% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Dec 2018
$125m
SERIES C
Sep 2017
$39m
SERIES B
Total funding: $190.1m
Company benefits
- 401k
- FSA
- Mental health resources
- Employee Resource Groups
- Stipend for growth opportunities
- Pet friendly office
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
Company HQ
Evergreen Park, Palo Alto, CA
Leadership
Ram Palaniappan
(Founder & CEO)Was Senior Operations Manager at Reflect.com, a P&G company. Served as President of UniRush from 2004 to 2012.
Salary benchmarks
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