Software Engineer, Platform

Smartleaf

2d • $140,000 - $160,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for engineers who want to own problems end to end, and who care about making investment portfolio management scalable, correct and reliable. You have a high degree of personal responsibility and enjoy working across the entire application all the way from requirements through implementation and deployment.

Smartleaf is a Boston-based investment portfolio rebalancing service handling over $90 billion in assets. Our next milestone is doubling our capacity to handle 1 million accounts. In order to get to this next level of scale, we need to evolve our architecture and you can have a big impact on how we do that.

We value software engineering as a discipline. We’ll use AI where it reduces toil but not where it reduces understanding. We still expect every teammate to deeply understand what they ship. Generating lines of code has never been our bottleneck; figuring out the right problem to solve and the right thing to build is far more important.

We need a teammate who will ramp up within 1-3 months and help us get things done. We have more things to do than people to do them; if you are proactive, competent and reliable you can earn responsibility very quickly and help shape the way the department functions.

If you can bring skill, attention to detail and focus on getting working code into the world, while being a genuinely nice person to work with, we want to talk to you.

Requirements

• 2-6+ years of experience building production web applications
• Demonstrated ability to reason about systems with complex domain logic and concurrent, order-sensitive state
• Strong understanding of computing fundamentals, particularly multiprocessing and multithreading considerations
• Proficiency in Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks
• Strong SQL skills: comfortable writing complex multi-table queries, understanding query plans, and reasoning about data integrity
• 1+ years of daily experience working in a Linux environment: strong familiarity with common command-line utilities and Unix process management; comfortable with bash scripting

Nice To Haves

• Able to dive into unfamiliar codebases and quickly build up working knowledge of how multiple components interact
• Enjoy taking a cloud of complex problems and making them clear and straightforward
• Care deeply about understanding problems.
• Comfortable talking things through with others, even when understanding might be incomplete.
• Can make meaningful progress even before fully understanding the system.
• Strike a practical balance that keeps work moving: can ship a fix, stabilize a production fire, or get an MVP out the door and keep thinking critically about the problem afterward, turning it over until reaching a root cause or a clearer understanding.

Responsibilities

• Be at the intersection of domain knowledge, a complex data model and a stream of real-world events.
• Ensure the right things happen in the right order, and that edge cases are handled correctly.
• Figure out what correctness even means when multiple actions hit a portfolio at once.
• Distill complexity into a clear experience that allows financial advisors to understand the impact of their choices and present the best possible information to their clients.
• Work closely with our product management team and our users to gather requirements and design solutions.
• Participate in our support rotation and see firsthand how our users are interacting with the system.
• Explain issues, potential solutions and tradeoffs in ways that make sense to a variety of stakeholders.
• Build internal tools or pick up new skills to achieve our goals, and bootstrap quickly.

What This Job Offers

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