Principal Software Engineer, Upstart
Personal Loans
$195.3-270.4k
+ Bonus & Equity
More information about location
AI lending marketplace
Be an early applicant
AI lending marketplace
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$195.3-270.4k
+ Bonus & Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable effortless credit based on true risk.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent experience) and 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and scaling consumer-facing systems
- Proven experience operating at a Staff or Principal level, leading large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and system design at scale
- Demonstrated experience decomposing or modernizing tightly coupled systems into modular components/services with clear interfaces, while maintaining reliability and continuity
- Experience with experiment-driven development (instrumentation, A/B testing, analysis/iteration) and translating product goals into technical execution
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to explain complex technical topics to non-technical stakeholders
- Track record of successfully mentoring and developing other engineers around you while seeking out and appreciating constructive feedback
Desirable
- Experience with full stack web development with Ruby on Rails, React, and cloud-native development (AWS preferred) and Docker, GitHub Actions, utilizing CI/CD technologies including infrastructure as code
- Familiarity with onboarding/funnel optimization in high-scale consumer products, including conversion and time-to-complete improvements
- Experience in the customer support tech domain (e.g., contact center platforms, customer engagement solutions, or conversational AI systems)
- Experience building in regulated or high-trust domains (e.g., fintech, lending, identity/verification, payments) where correctness and compliance are first-class constraints
- We’re a distributed team of remote workers (from coast to coast), and while we predominantly build asynchronously, we prefer facetime when collaborating in a tight feedback loop. You’ll need to be comfortable with a few hours of Zoom per day (e.g. pair/mob programming) to excel in this role
What the job involves
- Set technical direction for the applicant funnel
- Define and drive the architecture of the end-to-end “Got Rate → Funded Loan” journey
- Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks impacting conversion, latency, and reliability
- Lead large, cross-team initiatives
- Own ambiguous, high-impact efforts that span Growth, Verifications Platform, Risk/Decisioning, and Lending Partners
- Align multiple teams around cohesive technical strategies and execution plans
- Evolve platform architecture
- Drive decomposition of tightly coupled systems into scalable, reusable services and APIs
- Enable cross-product reuse across unsecured lending while maintaining system integrity
- Translate complex business problems into systems
- Balance product velocity, risk constraints, compliance requirements, and long-term maintainability
- Partner deeply with product, risk, compliance, and operations to deliver measurable business outcomes
- Drive experimentation and intelligent automation
- Elevate experimentation frameworks and data-driven iteration across the funnel
- Identify and lead opportunities for AI-driven experiences (e.g., adaptive flows, conversational interfaces, automation)
- Raise the engineering bar
- Establish best practices in system design, observability, testing, and operational excellence
- Mentor senior and staff engineers and influence engineering culture across the organization
- Operate as a force multiplier
- Provide technical leadership beyond the team, influencing architecture and strategy across Personal Loans and adjacent domains
- Proactively identify long-term risks and opportunities, and drive alignment with leadership
Our take
Based in San Mateo, California, Upstart is piositioning itself as a leading AI lending marketplace, connecting millions of consumers with more than 100 banks and credit unions. In a market where credit access can be limited by traditional scoring methods, Upstart aims to make lending fairer and more accessible by using technology to better understand each borrowers true potential.
Upstart builds AI and cloud-based tools that help lenders approve more borrowers at lower rates. Its models analyze thousands of variables (not just credit scores) to predict creditworthiness more accurately. And through its platform, consumers can access personal, auto, and home-equity loans, as well as smaller "relief" loans, all through a seamless digital experience.
So far, its success is reflected in its high loan automation rate (over 90% of loans are fully processed without human intervention) and the billions in loan originations it has facilitated. The company continues to refine its AI models and expand its offerings, with the goal of helping lenders serve more customers while making borrowing easier and more affordable.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2019
$50m
SERIES D
Mar 2017
$32.5m
SERIES D
Total funding: $135.7m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive health plans
- 401k Plan
- Annual wellness reimbursement
- Disability insurance
- Generous vacation policy
- Flexible time off
- Parental leave
- Family forming benefits through Carrot
- Technology equipment budget
- Personal development budget
- Various clubs and extracurricular activities
- Catered lunches
- Fully stocked micro-kitchen
Company HQ
South San Mateo, San Mateo, CA
Leadership
David Girouard
(Founder & CEO)They started their career at Accenture and Booz Allen & Hamilton before working in Product Management at Apple and Virage. They left their role of 8 years as President of Enterprise at Google to found Upstart in March 2012.
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