Staff Engineer - New York

Eli•New York, NY

4d•$220,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Eli is building a better system to help utilities, government agencies, and their partners run energy programs more efficiently. The current systems rely on paperwork and manual processes, leading to delays in payments for contractors and administrative friction that reduces the effectiveness of funding. Eli's platform streamlines the process from project qualification to payment issuance, including advancing funds to contractors before rebates are paid. Since its launch in December 2023, Eli has processed hundreds of thousands of projects and advanced nearly $50 million to contractors, and is now scaling to handle greater volumes. This role is crucial for setting technical direction in critical areas like money movement, AI-driven decisions, and the underlying platform, while still actively contributing through coding.

Requirements

Strong engineering skills with a focus on debugging from first principles.
Proficiency in Git, including rebase.
Ability to reason through requests from the browser to the database and back.
Heavy use of AI agents while remaining the author and understanding the code.
Ability to defend any line of code written and explain how it was tested.
Focus on solving problems rather than just closing tickets.
Understanding of and care for the business, including rebate programs, underwriting, and contractor payments.
Comfort and competence in compliance- and security-heavy environments (e.g., SOC 2 audited).
Ability to write short, clear updates on progress, blockers, and timelines.
Strong opinions about tools and the ability to articulate why.
8+ years of experience building production software, including experience as the person responsible when a system breaks.
Staff-level scope or equivalent impact, having led system design and remained accountable in production.
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 and completing work outside of assigned areas.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Temporal or another workflow engine.
Experience with payments, ledgers, lending, or reconciliation.
Experience with dbt, Snowflake, or other analytics tooling.
Experience evaluating LLM output with test sets and metrics.
Experience with infrastructure tools like Pulumi, Docker, Vercel, Tailscale, Datadog, Sentry.
Experience in energy programs or utility software.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for systems where correctness is paramount, including money movement, AI-driven decisions, and the platform.
Write and ship code weekly, taking ownership of significant parts of the system.
Identify and take on work that needs to be done, without waiting for tickets.
Design systems that other engineers will build upon.
Build and iterate on features based on the needs of processors, contractors, and program administrators.
Develop AI-driven solutions for document verification, eligibility checks, and fraud detection.
Manage and ensure the accuracy of the money movement systems, including the ledger, loan tape reporting, and bank reconciliation.
Consolidate and improve internal tools, replacing systems like Airtable with in-house agentic solutions.
Maintain and improve the platform and production environment, including CI speed, test suite health, backups, database migrations, alerts, and workflows.
Troubleshoot and resolve production issues, identifying root causes and documenting solutions.
Contribute to shaping the engineering team's growth and hiring decisions.