Back End Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, NY

12h•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a rapidly growing fintech infrastructure company building modern technology to transform a large, complex financial industry. The company is rebuilding core industry infrastructure through software, creating a vertically integrated platform that automates complex workflows and enables banks, lenders, brokers, and other financial institutions to operate more efficiently. The engineering organization is growing quickly, with approximately 15 engineers today and plans to significantly expand the team. Engineers work across several core areas including API infrastructure, underwriting, and integrations. This role sits on the API team and focuses on building the core API that customers and developers directly interact with. The API is treated as a product in its own right, requiring thoughtful domain modeling, clear abstractions, strong developer experience, and reliable production systems. The ideal candidate is a product-oriented backend engineer who can work closely with customers and subject matter experts, translate complex business requirements into simple software models, and take ownership of systems from architecture through production.

Requirements

3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Strong backend software engineering experience.
Experience building customer-facing backend services.
Experience designing and maintaining production APIs.
Experience working at a VC-backed startup or fast-paced, reputable technology company.
Experience in fintech, financial services, PropTech, mortgage, SaaS, e-commerce, marketplaces, or developer tooling is highly valued.
Experience gathering requirements from customers or subject matter experts and translating them into products or features.
Demonstrated ability to work in fast-moving environments with significant individual ownership.
Non-traditional career trajectories into software engineering are welcome.
Strong professional experience with TypeScript.
Strong experience designing and building production-grade GraphQL APIs.
Experience with backend frameworks such as NestJS.
Strong SQL and relational database experience.
Experience building scalable production backend services.
Strong understanding of API design, domain modeling, and software architecture.
Familiarity with AWS or other major cloud platforms.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, debugging, reliability, and maintainability.
Strong product-oriented mindset.
Experience translating ambiguous business requirements into technical solutions.
Comfortable working directly with customers or subject matter experts.
Ability to model complex business domains into clear software abstractions.
Strong understanding of API design as a product surface.
Experience building software for non-technical users or customers.
High ownership and accountability.
Strong product instincts.
Comfortable operating in a fast-paced startup environment.
Strong communication and customer empathy.
Able to gather requirements and turn ambiguity into clear technical solutions.
Comfortable working closely with subject matter experts.
Strong problem-solving and systems-thinking skills.
Pragmatic and focused on building simple, durable abstractions.
Comfortable taking ownership from idea through production.
Curious and motivated by complex business problems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with event-driven architectures is a plus.
Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal is a plus.
Experience with fintech, insurance, logistics, SaaS, e-commerce, marketplaces, or other complex operational domains is a strong plus.
Openness to modern AI and LLM-enabled development practices is valued.
Experience with agentic workflows is a plus.

Responsibilities

Build & Own the Core API Platform: Design, build, and maintain production-grade GraphQL APIs. Own the core API as a customer-facing product rather than simply an internal backend service. Develop clean, scalable abstractions that make complex business workflows intuitive for developers. Own API versioning, breaking changes, documentation, and developer onboarding. Design APIs that can evolve as the underlying business domain becomes more sophisticated. Build reliable backend services using TypeScript and modern cloud infrastructure.
Model Complex Business Domains: Translate complex financial workflows into clear, maintainable software models. Define domain semantics and abstractions that accurately represent real-world business processes. Design systems that support both current requirements and future product capabilities. Work closely with subject matter experts to understand complex workflows and edge cases. Simplify complicated business processes into intuitive developer-facing APIs. Build thoughtful abstractions that reduce complexity and make workflows difficult to misuse.
Build Event-Driven & Workflow Systems: Help evolve the backend architecture toward event-driven systems. Build systems that proactively communicate what happened, why it happened, and what should happen next. Work with workflow orchestration technologies such as Temporal. Design reliable asynchronous workflows and backend services. Build production systems capable of handling complex, multi-step business processes. Improve reliability, observability, and scalability across backend services.
Partner With Customers & Product Teams: Work directly with customers and subject matter experts to understand their needs. Translate customer feedback into product and API improvements. Partner with product and engineering teams to define requirements and prioritize features. Help ensure APIs provide a strong developer experience for customers building directly on the platform. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Own features from initial requirements through design, implementation, launch, and iteration.

Benefits

$140,000 – $250,000 base salary.
Flexibility for exceptional candidates.
0.05% – 0.17% equity.
Full-time position.
Hybrid work model with at least 3 days per week in-office.
Strong preference for Palo Alto, with New York City as an option.
Remote work may be considered for an exceptional candidate.
Open to visa transfers and new H-1B sponsorship.
Opportunity to work on foundational infrastructure in a large financial-services market.
Significant ownership over a core customer-facing API.