Software Engineer, Cardless

• We care more about how you think than about what you've built before. Strong systems thinking and problem solving travel across domains. Direct experience in payments, lending, or financial infrastructure is a real advantage and we weight it heavily, but we would rather hire someone sharp who will learn this domain than someone who has only ever worked in it
• This role is open at multiple levels, from mid-level through staff. We calibrate level during the process rather than before it
• 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
• Fintech, payments, lending, or card issuing experience: authorization, ledgers, settlement, reconciliation, disputes, or regulatory work

Desirable

• As a Backend Engineer at Cardless, you'll work across the systems that run our partners' card programs: applications and underwriting, accounts and ledgers, transactions and payments, rewards, risk, and the APIs our partners build against
• We keep this role deliberately general. There is more work than there are people, and the engineers who do best here are the ones who move to wherever the problem is. There are three kinds of work on our roadmap, and most people touch all three:
• Building things that don't exist yet, usually because a partner needs them to launch
• Scaling and hardening what we already run, so the platform holds up as we add partners and volume
• Laying groundwork for products we haven't launched, including bringing more of the core financial infrastructure in-house
• 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