Software Engineer - Ledger

Cardless•San Francisco, CA

1d•$190,000 - $295,000•Onsite

About The Position

Cardless is building the infrastructure for the world's best companies to design, build, and launch financial products of their own. Companies like Coinbase and Bilt use Cardless to create credit cards that feel entirely their own. In an industry where branded financial products usually mean shared logos and shared control, Cardless is built to disappear. Our APIs and components shape the journey from the first application to every purchase, reward, and moment of support that follows, while we handle lending, compliance, and operations behind the scenes. In September 2025, we raised a $60 million Series C led by Spark Capital, bringing our total funding to $170 million. The team is over 70 people and scaling toward profitability by year-end 2026. We're looking for kind, humble people with high standards and low egos. We take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. We see what could be improved, make it so, and leave every product, system, and team better than we found it. About the role As a Software Engineer on Ledger at Cardless, you'll own the system that tracks what every cardholder owes us and what we owe them. The ledger is the system of record for balances across every card program we run. Statements, interest, how payments get applied, what a customer sees in the app, what we report to our partners: all of it depends on the ledger being right. You'll own its architecture. Credit ledgers are harder than most. A balance revolves, accrues interest, gets billed on a cycle, and takes payments that have to be applied across principal, fees, and interest in a particular order. When any of that is wrong it turns up in someone's statement, or in a regulatory filing, or in a reconciliation break three weeks later. This is a senior-to-staff role with real architectural ownership, and it's a founding engineering role on our ledger and credit systems.

Requirements

6+ years building production backend systems, with meaningful time on ledger, core banking, money movement, or payments platform work
You've built one, not integrated with one. At least one of: a double-entry ledger that became the system of record for balances; in-house card processing or authorization and settlement infrastructure; or a migration of a card or money-movement program off a third-party processor onto in-house rails
You think in invariants: idempotency, immutability, event sourcing, what has to hold at all times and how you'd prove it holds
Strong distributed systems and API fundamentals in a modern backend language
You're comfortable with ambiguity. You'll be scoping your own work, and you'll have to explain your tradeoffs to colleagues across functions

Nice To Haves

Credit card ledgers specifically: revolving credit, billing cycles, interest accrual, APR, minimum payments, payment waterfalls, installment plans, Reg Z / TILA
Auth-to-settlement lifecycle: pending versus posted, capture, clearing, network files, ISO 8583, refunds and reversals, dispute and chargeback accounting
You built or rewrote the ledger at a Chime, Stripe, Block, Affirm, Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Increase, or Modern Treasury and want to own one end to end
You built an issuing platform at a Marqeta, Lithic, Highnote, Galileo and want to be on the program side of it

Responsibilities

Own the double-entry ledger that is the system of record for balances across every card program we run, and the invariants it has to hold
Build the credit mechanics on top of it: billing cycle close, statement generation, interest accrual, payment allocation, fees, delinquency, and charge-off
Own reconciliation from sub-ledger to GL, and build the break detection that catches silent failures before close
Set the architecture and decide what gets built in what order
Work directly with Finance, Compliance, and our partners on the requirements a ledger has to satisfy to survive an audit