Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer, Cardless

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Desirable

• 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