Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing a team of 5+ engineers.
Significant experience with backend services and distributed systems, especially high-volume customer-facing services.
Experience with external partner integrations, third-party APIs, or SDKs.
Familiarity with regulated environments and collaboration with Legal and Compliance teams.
Hands-on experience with AI-assisted engineering tools like Cursor and Claude Code.
Ability to leverage customer insights and business metrics to guide product development.
Responsibilities
Lead and develop a team of backend and mobile engineers, managing performance and growth.
Define hiring needs, conduct interviews, and onboard new team members.
Oversee project delivery, manage planning and sprint cycles, and ensure commitments are met.
Collaborate with the GM to shape the quarterly roadmap based on data-driven insights.
Measure and analyze the impact of team outputs using business metrics and experiments.
Contribute to technical direction and prioritize technical debt with engineering leads.
Ensure operational health of high-traffic services, including incident response and documentation.
Coordinate with various departments and external partners for successful launches.
Promote AI-native engineering practices and mentor engineers in their application.
Benefits
Hybrid work model requiring 2 days in-office per week.
Equity options available as part of compensation.
Access to a fast-growing marketplace business unit.
Opportunity to lead innovative AI-native engineering practices.
Engagement with a diverse range of partners and technologies.
Full Job Description
POSITION SUMMARY
EarnIn's marketplace business unit is focused on helping members earn rewards, save on everyday spending, and build credit through products like Rent Reporting. It is one of our fastest-growing revenue lines, and its platform for partner integrations, rewards, and ranking is reused across the company. You'll lead a full-stack team including staff-level tech leads that pioneered AI-native, spec-driven development at EarnIn. You'll bring a product-minded approach, using member and partner data to shape what the team builds, while helping partners launch faster and keeping high-traffic, critical-path services reliable. The Mountain View base salary range for this full-time position is $266,793-$326,081, plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. This hybrid position in Mountain View requires 2 days of in-office work per week.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Lead, coach, and grow a team of backend and mobile engineers, including staff-level tech leads. Own the full performance cycle, from expectations and feedback to calibration, leveling, and development plans.
Own hiring for the team: define roles, run interview loops, calibrate levels, and close candidates with full-stack range.
Drive delivery: run the team's planning and sprint cadence, remove blockers, meet commitments on partner launches and platform work, and report status and risks to leadership.
Partner with the GM to shape the quarterly roadmap: bring ideas grounded in member and partner data, size the ROI of competing work, and make scope trade-offs explicit.
Measure the impact of what the team ships using experiments and business metrics such as conversion, partner revenue, and member engagement, and use the results to decide what to build next.
Contribute to technical direction with staff engineers and architects, including design reviews, tech-debt prioritization, and build-vs-buy decisions across partner integrations, rewards, and ranking.
Own operational health for a high-traffic service, including on-call, runbooks, ops reviews, and incident response.
Coordinate your team's deliverables with Legal, Compliance, Finance, CX, and external partners on launches, and raise dependencies early.
Champion AI-native engineering practices, including spec-driven development and agentic tooling, and coach engineers to use AI with rigor and judgment.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing a team of 5+ engineers, with experience hiring and developing them.
Significant experience with backend services and distributed systems, including operating customer-facing services at high request volume, plus working knowledge of iOS or Android development.
Experience delivering integrations with external partners, third-party APIs, or SDKs.
Experience shipping products in a regulated environment alongside Legal, Compliance, or bank partners.
Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools such as Cursor and Claude Code, with the judgment to apply them to planning, coding, triage, and technical decisions.
Experience shaping what your team builds, not just how, using customer insight, experiments, and business metrics to set priorities and scope lean MVPs.
Nice to have: experience with marketplaces, rewards or loyalty, ad-tech, payments, or experimentation, personalization, and ranking systems.
#LI-Hybrid
About Earnin
Earnin is a financial services company that provides a mobile app that allows users to access their earned wages before payday. The app uses a proprietary algorithm to determine how much money users can access based on their work history and other factors. Earnin was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
