Staff Software Engineer

Lower • Columbus, OH

19d • Hybrid

About The Position

Lower is building technology that powers digital mortgage, home finance, automation, and AI-powered experiences across the homeownership journey. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of core services, systems, and architectural patterns across Lower’s engineering organization. You’ll operate as a technical leader across teams, helping scale our platforms, mentor engineers, and drive high-impact technical initiatives that improve both developer effectiveness and customer experience. This is an opportunity to join a fintech company redefining the mortgage industry by combining data-driven insights with thoughtful user experiences. You’ll work on impactful projects, collaborate with a talented team, and help us build scalable systems that directly improve how people achieve one of life’s biggest milestones—owning a home.

Requirements

• Full-stack expertise with proven ability to deliver high-quality backend and front-end solutions.
• Problem solver and innovator, with a track record of implementing new ideas and tackling complex technical challenges in design and architecture.
• Proficiency in our stack— TypeScript, React, AWS, Next.js, Node.js, C#/.NET, Go and Postgres —or the ability to quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and tools.
• Experience leveraging AI-assisted software development tools (such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, debugging, testing, and developer efficiency.
• Strong computer science foundations, including algorithms, data structures, concurrency, parallelism, asynchronous programming, networking, and system design.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams, lead architectural initiatives, and operate effectively in ambiguous or rapidly evolving environments.
• Strong track record of mentoring engineers, scaling engineering best practices, and improving technical decision-making within growing organizations.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills—someone who brings strong opinions held loosely, engages debate without ego, gives and receives feedback constructively, and helps foster a supportive engineering culture. We're looking for someone people want to design alongside.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience in fintech, lending, or consumer financial products is a plus, but not required.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems, driving architectural decisions across teams while balancing performance, cost, complexity, and long-term platform scalability.
• Strong in unit, integration, end-to-end testing, and test automation frameworks.
• Proficiency in profiling, debugging, and optimizing application performance.
• Experience with deployment pipelines, monitoring, observability, and release management.
• Knowledge of secure coding practices, threat modeling, and compliance requirements.
• Comfortable designing and consuming APIs, working with databases, and handling data modeling.
• Skilled at improving developer workflows through automation (build systems, config management, test infrastructure) and modern AI-assisted engineering tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar technologies to accelerate development, debugging, testing, and documentation workflows.
• Partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to translate strategic business initiatives into scalable technical solutions, clearly communicating tradeoffs, risks, and long-term architectural considerations.
• Coach junior and mid-level engineers, providing guidance on coding practices, system design, and career development.
• Promote best practices in readability, maintainability, and scalability through constructive code reviews, providing guidance and support.
• Lead through technical influence, mentorship, and collaboration rather than direct authority, helping elevate engineering quality and decision-making across the organization.
• Drive alignment and technical execution across multiple engineering teams, fostering collaboration, reducing organizational friction, and promoting shared engineering standards and best practices.
• Lead large, ambiguous, or cross-functional technical initiatives from architecture through delivery, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability across systems and teams.
• Identify risks early (technical debt, bottlenecks, scalability limits) and propose mitigations.
• Weigh cost, scalability, and performance when evaluating solutions and clearly explain reasoning.
• Produce and maintain high-quality technical documentation for systems, processes, and decisions.
• Proactively identify and resolve technical, operational, or coordination roadblocks impacting engineering teams, improving delivery velocity and cross-team effectiveness.
• Identify systemic engineering bottlenecks, operational inefficiencies, and architectural gaps, driving initiatives that improve developer productivity, platform reliability, and organizational scalability.
• Influence long-term technical direction, helping shape architecture and tech stack decisions.
• Serve as a technical leader across multiple engineering teams, helping establish architectural patterns, engineering standards, and shared platform direction.
• Proactively identify opportunities for new technologies, frameworks, or approaches that benefit the business.
• Advocate for engineering excellence, ensuring the team balances speed with maintainability.
• Develop deep expertise in Lower’s systems, infrastructure, and domain workflows, helping teams navigate technical complexity and make informed architectural decisions.

Benefits

• Extended benefit offerings including medical/dental/vision, parental leave, life insurance, short- and long-term disability
• Paid holidays and paid time off
• 401K with company match
• Discount on home mortgage refinances or purchase

What This Job Offers

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