Staff Software Engineer, Retirements Account

Robinhood•New York, NY

14h•$230,000 - $270,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Robinhood is building an elite team to apply frontier technologies to the world’s biggest financial problems, focusing on democratizing finance for all. This role is part of a historic national initiative to develop and operate infrastructure for Trump Accounts, expanding market access for the next generation of Americans. The Retirements and Accounts team specifically focuses on building and scaling systems for long-term investing and account management. As a Staff Backend Engineer (IC6), you will be a foundational technical leader for this 0-to-1 initiative, responsible for designing and building the critical backend architecture, pipelines, and integrations required to interface securely with government systems and banking partners. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role based in New York, NY, with a hybrid in-office expectation of 3 days per week. Robinhood emphasizes the value of in-person work for progress, innovation, and community.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of operating as a principal or staff-level engineer, driving multi-year technical vision, long-term architecture, and strategic direction for large-scale distributed systems.
Advanced mastery-level proficiency in designing, building, and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency distributed infrastructure and secure data pipelines using Python or Go.
Deep expertise in domain modeling, microservices architecture, and building highly reliable APIs capable of orchestrating complex cross-functional data flows across multiple engineering domains.
Demonstrable execution in a zero-to-one product space, navigating high levels of technical ambiguity, setting foundational engineering patterns, and systematically de-risking complex technical blockers.
Experience serving as a primary technical point of contact across an entire organization, with a strong commitment to raising the engineering bar by sponsoring and mentoring senior engineers.
Exceptional communication skills with a proven capability to partner closely with Product, Security, Compliance, and external institutional partners to translate highly complex legal or regulatory constraints into clean, maintainable backend infrastructure.
This position is restricted to US citizens or lawful permanent residents due to legal requirements.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design, architectural strategy, and implementation of a brand-new, standalone backend infrastructure optimized for security, reliability, and scale.
Design secure data pipelines and robust APIs to integrate government-backed registries, employer contribution frameworks, and institutional banking systems.
Guide engineering teams across Robinhood's broader brokerage ecosystem, fostering technical excellence, setting high bar code standards, and mentoring senior engineers.
Partner closely with Product, Security, Legal, and external stakeholders to navigate the unique protections and technical compliance protocols of a highly regulated government contract.
Own backend stability and performance tuning ahead of initial high-volume user rollouts and the general public launch.