Founding Engineer - GovTech

EQL Tech•San Francisco, CA

4h•$125,000 - $175,000•Onsite

About The Position

EQL Tech is representing a well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds). The $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life's work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.

Requirements

You'd rather design the first version of a system than optimize someone else's.
You're comfortable making the call when there's no precedent to point to.
You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis.
Retries don't erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives — the database.
You build systems that stay predictable anyway.
You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving.
You're not looking to contribute to a system — you want to have engineered it.
Able to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)

Nice To Haves

Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing, or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus

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 the 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 so we can reason about every flow.
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.
Build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.
Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing.
Build the automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, because none exist yet.