Founding Engineer - GovTech

EQL Tech • San Francisco, CA

9d • $125,000 - $175,000 • Onsite

About The Position

This role is for a Founding Engineer in the GovTech sector, focusing on building the infrastructure for a new category of public-sector fintech. The company has raised $16M and is developing financial rails to help families access State education funds (ESAs). The position involves working directly with co-founders to create systems for managing billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing, disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting. The company is committed to its mission and has rejected acquisition offers to ensure the project is done correctly. The team consists of founders with engineering and education backgrounds, along with experienced professionals from companies like MILA, SpaceX, Mercury, Stripe, Circle, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs, as well as former state agency personnel.

Requirements

• Ability to design the first version of a system rather than optimize an existing one.
• Comfortable making decisions when there is no precedent.
• Obsessive about correctness, understanding the compounding effect of small errors.
• Proficiency in building systems that remain predictable despite unreliable external factors like bank downtime or API changes.
• Desire for ownership and to be the primary trusted individual for money movement.
• Ability to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA.
• Visa support is available.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing, or comparable card and banking infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up.
• Make architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.
• Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay.
• Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.
• Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales.
• Keep independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing.
• Build automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary: $125,000 – $175,000 per year
• Generous Founding Equity
• Top-Tier Backing: Raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels
• Relocation Support
• Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship
• Unmatched Impact: Opportunity to shape the future of public education funding access for parents.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed