Senior Engineer - New York

Eli • New York City, NY

19h • Hybrid

About The Position

Eli is building a better system to streamline energy programs, which currently rely on manual processes and disconnected systems. The platform helps utilities, government agencies, and their partners manage energy programs from project qualification to payment issuance. Eli also provides early funding to contractors through a credit facility, improving their cash flow. Since its launch in December 2023, Eli has processed hundreds of thousands of projects and advanced nearly $50 million to contractors. The company is preparing to scale its operations significantly. This role involves working directly with the cofounders on critical aspects of the platform, including product development, AI-driven decision-making for payments, money movement and reconciliation, internal tooling, and platform stability. The engineering team is small and collaborative, with a focus on ownership and rapid iteration. The company utilizes AI agents for code generation and PR reviews, but emphasizes the engineer's responsibility for understanding, defending, and ensuring the quality of all code.

Requirements

• Strong engineering skills with a focus on debugging from first principles, proficiency in Git (including rebase), and the ability to trace requests from browser to database.
• Ability to heavily utilize AI agents while remaining the author and owner of the code.
• Ability to answer questions based on personal understanding and defend any line of code in a PR.
• Measure work by problems solved, not tickets closed.
• Care about the business, understanding rebate programs, underwriting, and contractor payments, and pushing back on incorrect specifications.
• Comfortable and competent in compliance- and security-heavy environments (SOC 2 audited, handling personal and financial data).
• Ability to write short, clear updates on progress, blockers, and timelines.
• Strong opinions about tools and the ability to articulate their reasoning.
• 6+ years of experience building production software, including experience as the person responsible for a system when it breaks.
• Deep TypeScript experience on the backend (Bun, Node, Next.js, tRPC, Prisma or similar).
• Solid relational database skills in MySQL or Postgres, including schema design, query plans, and migrations.
• A track record of taking on work outside of assigned areas and completing it.

Nice To Haves

• Temporal or another workflow engine
• Experience with payments, ledgers, lending, or reconciliation
• dbt, Snowflake, or other analytics tooling
• Evaluating LLM output with test sets and metrics
• Infrastructure experience with Pulumi, Docker, Vercel, Tailscale, Datadog, Sentry

Responsibilities

• Own product development end-to-end, understanding the needs of processors, contractors, and program administrators, building solutions, and iterating based on production feedback.
• Develop and manage AI-driven decisions for money movement, including document verification, eligibility checks, and fraud detection, determining the appropriate use of models, rules, or human review.
• Manage money movement processes, including the ledger, loan reporting to lenders, and bank reconciliation, ensuring accuracy to the cent for audit purposes.
• Develop and consolidate internal tools, migrating from systems like Airtable to agentic, in-house solutions for operations and program configuration.
• Maintain and improve the platform and production environment, including CI speed, test suite health, backups, database migrations, alerts, and workflows. Investigate and resolve production issues, documenting root causes and fixes.

Benefits

• Generous medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible, unlimited time off, with a minimum of three weeks encouraged
• At least two company gatherings each year
• Budget to co-work when solving difficult problems together
• A welcoming, family- and parent-friendly environment that values humility, honesty, and humor
• Meaningful equity package

What This Job Offers

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