Senior Backend Engineer (Grant Underwriting and Payment)

• We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Grant Core team and help us scale. You’ll be working on the critical systems that power our underwriting decisions, payment processing, and collection strategies
• Payment Infrastructure: Own and scale our multi-rail payment systems (ACH, RTP, card networks) to handle transaction volume while maintaining 99.99% reliability
• Distributed Systems: Design and build scalable backend services that can handle millions of transactions with low latency and high throughput
• Background Processing: Optimize our Sidekiq job infrastructure to efficiently process complex workflows for underwriting, collections, and payment distribution
• System Architecture: Lead architectural decisions for our core financial systems, balancing speed, reliability, and cost as we scale
• Data Pipeline Engineering: Build robust data pipelines that power our ML models and real-time decision engines
• You’ll work closely with our product and data science teams to ship features that directly impact our customers’ financial wellbeing while maintaining the highest standards of reliability and security
• What Makes This Role Exciting:
• Work on real-time payment systems at the cutting edge of fintech infrastructure
• Your work directly improves the financial lives of real customers
• Greenfield opportunities to architect new systems alongside legacy modernization challenges
• Small, high-impact team where your contributions are immediately visible
• Solve interesting technical problems at the intersection of payments, ML, and distributed systems

Benefits

• Health Benefits
• Flexible PTO Policy
• Kickoff Paid Holidays
• Office Lunch & Dinners
• Commuter Benefits
• Commuter Flexible Savings
• 401k Matching
• Fitness Benefit Policy- Strong systems design skills - you’ve architected and shipped distributed systems that handle high throughput and maintain data consistency
• Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar)
• 5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems
• Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning
• Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, real-time payments)
• Track record of making infrastructure decisions that balance technical excellence with business pragmatism
• Experience working with ML/data science teams to productionize models and algorithms
• Background in fintech, payments, or lending infrastructure
• Strong system observability mindset (metrics, logging, tracing, monitoring)
• Mentorship: Help level up the team through code reviews, design docs, and technical guidance
• Impact Focus: Balance technical perfection with pragmatic delivery - you know when to build for scale vs. ship fast
• Operational Excellence: Take ownership of the reliability and performance of the systems you build
• Technical Leadership: Ability to own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation and rollout
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner effectively with product, data science, and operations to deliver customer value