Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

Co-branded cards alone account for over $300 billion in U.S. annual spend, and most still run on legacy bank rails. Imprint is the modern alternative: flexible, embeddable, and built for how people actually pay today

Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, Ribbit, and Khosla Ventures, we’re building a world-class team to redefine how people pay and how brands grow. If you want to move fast, solve hard problems, and own real outcomes, we want to meet you

The backend is core to this expansion: every transaction, every credit decision, and every rewards calculation runs on the financial infrastructure we build. At the Staff level, you’ll provide both the technical and cultural leverage that helps the team and the systems scale together

Drive architecture and implementation of critical financial systems: from transaction authorization and ledger accounting, to credit decisioning, to rewards engines and payment processing. You write code, make design decisions, and own outcomes

Shape net-new products from ideation through delivery: as Imprint expands into new financial products and a deeper rewards platform, you’ll define technical approaches for systems that don’t exist yet while evolving the ones that do

Define foundational platform direction: set the technical vision for shared services, API infrastructure, and developer tooling that make the entire engineering team faster and more reliable

Leverage AI across the stack: from prototyping to testing to production code, learning how to leverage AI tools is a core consideration for how we work

Drive alignment across a wide cross-functional surface: product, design, infrastructure, compliance, solutions engineering, and brand partners. You bring engineering perspective into the room where decisions are made

Raise the technical and cultural bar: mentor and sponsor engineers across the spectrum of seniority, foster psychological safety, and drive technical rigor in how the team designs, reviews, and ships

Stack:

Go, MySQL, DynamoDB, Temporal, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Statsig

Experience using AI tools (code assistants, MCP servers, agentic workflows) to accelerate development, or genuine enthusiasm to adopt them

You drive technical alignment across product managers, business stakeholders, and engineers of all levels

10+ years of experience building production backend systems, operating in the details and driving strong technical outcomes

You operate fluidly across staff archetypes depending on context — tech lead, architect, solver — adapting your approach to what the team and problem need

Experience ensuring data consistency and transactional integrity across distributed systems

Strong with relational databases: schema design, migrations, and query performance tuning

You model the culture you want to see: psychological safety, intellectual honesty, and high standards for craft

You communicate clearly at every level, from pairing on implementation details to presenting technical strategy to leadership

You’ve architected and shipped systems that handle real money, real users, or real-time decisions, and you’ve made the teams around you better in the process

Startup experience a plus

Proficiency in Go (our primary backend language), or a similar language with willingness to ramp quickly

We don’t expect every candidate to match every bullet. If you’re excited about what we’re building and confident you can contribute, we’d love to