Infrastructure Engineer

EQL Tech • San Francisco, CA

8d • Onsite

About The Position

As Infrastructure Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through Pathfinder's stack — from card issuing to disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting. You will work directly alongside the co-founders to build the technical backbone the company's mission depends on.

Requirements

• Obsessive About Correctness: 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 can spot a discrepancy before it becomes a problem.
• Assumes the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors change APIs without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway — "reliable" to you means consistent behaviour at 10 payments or 10,000,000.
• Craves Ownership: 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 so that emergencies are rare and recoverable when they happen.
• High-Auditability Mindset: You're willing to go deep on a single missing transaction and trace it through every layer of the stack. You build tooling that lets you and your team investigate mismatches fast, not the next morning.
• Able to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA or Phoenix, AZ (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 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.
• Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements).
• Payment Systems Architecture: Own and evolve a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs. 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.
• Ledger Integrity Reconciliation: Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing. You can spot a missing cent and get to the root before errors compound. You will build and improve automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, not the next morning.

Benefits

• Generous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.
• Top-Tier Backing: We’ve raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels.
• Relocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA, or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to visit customers. We’re an in-person company and are in the office together.
• Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.
• Unmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year)

What This Job Offers

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