Sr. Backend Engineer, AI Projects

Pinwheel•New York, NY

28d•$160,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Pinwheel is building the next generation of financial products, partnering with major brands to revolutionize banking experiences, especially in the AI age. We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Integrations Platform (IP) team. This team is responsible for the services, primitives, and tooling that enable over 1800 integrations to function at scale. The role involves owning AI-driven, platform-level problem spaces end-to-end, enhancing technical standards, and significantly improving the productivity of the Integrations Engineering team. You will be responsible for identifying recurring problems, designing systems to solve them, and leading execution with the support of junior and mid-level engineers. This is a hybrid role requiring three days a week in our NYC headquarters.

Requirements

5+ years of backend engineering experience
Computer Science degree or comparable experience
AI-forward thinking: you have set yourself apart from others in willingness to drive AI projects forward
Strong systems design: your designs get adopted by peers; you can defend tradeoffs and anticipate failure modes
Demonstrated autonomous project leadership: examples of owning ambiguous, multi-quarter projects from idea to business outcomes

Nice To Haves

Integrations experience: you've built against third-party APIs, dealt with auth flows, rate limits, and the operational reality of depending on external systems
Browser automation experience (Selenium, CDP, Playwright): useful context for our integration surface
Browser fingerprinting / detection work
Experience designing and operating services that handle concurrency, failure modes, and meaningful scale
Experience with backend platform / infrastructure: services, queues, data pipelines, async processing
Expertise in Python
Experience working in Fintech or comparable regulatory environment
Track record of reducing oncall noise

Responsibilities

Own platform initiatives end-to-end: scope, design, build, ship, and maintain
Drive systems design for new integration infrastructure, including services, queues, data pipelines, async workflows
Lead projects staffed with junior and mid-level engineers; make them measurably more productive through code review, design feedback, and the systems you build
Identify and eliminate classes of problems rather than patching individual one off bugs
Set technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces
Collaborate closely with IE and adjacent teams to ensure platform primitives meet real consumer needs