Staff Software Engineer, Finch
Platform
$210-241.5k
+ Equity with a 10-year exercise window
2+ days a week in office
API for payroll & HR
Be an early applicant
API for payroll & HR
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$210-241.5k
+ Equity with a 10-year exercise window
2+ days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To democratise access to the infrastructure that underpins the employment sector, and unlock much-needed innovations for both employers and employees.
Role
Who you are
- You thrive in small teams with large scope and limited hand-holding
- You're comfortable saying "not yet" to good ideas because you understand prioritization and opportunity cost
- You get energy from unblocking other engineers and improving their day-to-day experience
- You're equally comfortable writing and reviewing code and explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
- You prefer high-impact infrastructure work over resume-driven development
- You've mentored engineers before and genuinely enjoy helping others grow
- 9+ years of backend/infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years in platform/SRE/DevOps roles
- Experience managing large backlogs and making prioritization trade-offs
- Proven ability to stabilize unreliable systems (CI, infrastructure, observability)
- Mentorship experience—you'll guide engineers who need technical leadership
- Strong communication skills to advocate for platform needs and explain trade-offs
- Comfort with ambiguity and autonomy—you'll define what "good" looks like
- Ability to balance tech debt paydown with new feature delivery
- Experience working with NodeJS, PostgreSQL, and Redis, or similar, at scale
- Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking
- Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus
- CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
- Experience working AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred)
- Kubernetes (deployments, scaling, troubleshooting, security)
- Experience using a distributed messaging system
- Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
What the job involves
- We're a team of problem solvers who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions. We value velocity, curiosity, empathy, and diverse perspectives
- Everyone on the team is excited about the scope of the problems we address and the potential impact our work can have on the global workforce. We realize that the value we provide comes with great responsibilities, and therefore make security and privacy our highest priorities
- We come from a diverse set of backgrounds and each member brings different skills to the group. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description
- Your skills and potential will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns
- Finch's Platform team owns the infrastructure and developer experience that powers our engineering organization
- We're a 4-person team with a high-impact backlog spanning infrastructure stability, developer tooling, architectural decomposition, and security
- We need a senior engineer to help prioritize this work, lead critical projects, and support the team. You'll have significant autonomy and immediate impact
- There is a mix of greenfield work and high-leverage infrastructure improvements that enable the entire company to move faster and more reliably
- Live by and champion our values: #empathy, #execution, #humility, #curiosity
- Lead critical infrastructure projects and drive architectural decisions that will span across multiple teams ranging from problem definition/scoping to execution and see it through to successful and smooth delivery of impactful solutions
- Establish platform engineering standards and partner with product teams on reliability, performance, and architecture
- Be hands on in various parts of the system like AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, internal tooling and application layer
- Communicate platform priorities and trade-offs to engineering leadership and help them with building a prioritized roadmap
- Mentor other engineers who need technical guidance
Our take
HR teams often deal with disparate systems for employee information and payroll that don't line up neatly with one another. This requires a large amount of manual data entry, slowing vital processes down. Finch exists to solve this, providing APIs that allow companies to build a unified process and single dashboard for all a company's HR functions.
Through Finch, HR teams can manage employee benefit contributions, onboard new employees and much more without having to manually pull data from spreadsheets, pdfs and internal servers. Though it isn't the only company tackling this issue, Finch stands out for security features which allow for the data it handles to be encrypted in transit as well as at rest.
The company has raised significant funding which support further product development and the expansion of its team, especially across engineering, product and customer success. As the company is already revenue positive, and the demand for its product is only growing, Finch is well poised for future success.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
90% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jun 2023
$3.5m
LATE VC
Feb 2023
$40m
SERIES B
Total funding: $64.7m
Company benefits
- $1K to build your home office
- 401(k) retirement program
- Equity to full-time teammates
- Stipend for co-working spaces
- $100/month wellness stipend
- Professional development budget
- $600/month stipend for groceries
- Company-wide off-sites twice a year
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jeremy Zhang
(Co-Founder & CEO)Studied Electrical Engineering and Economics at Duke University. Was a Y Combinator member in 2020. Worked in R&D at Amazon Robotics, and as an Early Engineer at Smartcar.
Ansel Parikh
(Co-Founder & COO)Studied at NYU Stern School of Business and Y Combinator. Worked as an Equity Research Associate. They are an Investor at Kleiner Perkins and Bond.
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