Smartsheet

Senior Backend Engineer, Risk Systems

Smartsheet$130K — $180K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience in a fast-paced environment
  • Proficiency in Node.js/TypeScript and Python for production backend
  • Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases and ETL/data pipelines
  • Proven track record of designing dependable APIs and services
  • Ability to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • High level of ownership and proactivity in undefined problem scenarios
  • Experience collaborating with data science and credit risk teams for production workflows.

Responsibilities

  • Build and manage production systems for underwriting and risk operations
  • Translate complex risk models into reliable backend services
  • Develop reusable infrastructure for decisioning and monitoring
  • Collaborate with Risk and Data Science on clean data contracts
  • Create internal tools to enhance credit risk team workflows
  • Communicate technical system assumptions and migration plans clearly
  • Lead ambiguous projects from definition through to production delivery.

Benefits

  • High ownership and impact due to a small team structure
  • Direct reporting to the CEO, enhancing visibility and influence
  • Involvement in building B2B credit operating systems for scalable workflows
  • Focus on improving underwriting efficiencies with collaborative teams
  • Opportunities to work with industry-leading backers and investors.
Full Job Description
The role

You will work on the backend and data systems that sit between Engineering, and Data Science.

You should be excited by messy, important problems. Your job is to turn ambiguous risk and underwriting workflows and improvements into reliable production systems, whether it's decisioning services, new models, data contracts, credit review tools, policy execution, monitoring, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

What you'll do
  • Build and own production systems for underwriting, bank-data review, policy execution, credit review workflows, portfolio monitoring, and risk operations.
  • Translate risk models, underwriting policies, and data science requirements into reliable backend services with clear interfaces, tests, observability, rollback paths, and ownership.
  • Create reusable infrastructure for evidence gathering, decisioning, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop review.
  • Partner closely with Risk and Data Science to define clean contracts between research/prototype code and production backend systems.
  • Build internal tools that help the credit risk team review data, understand decisions, handle exceptions, and move faster without sacrificing correctness.
  • Clearly communicate technical assumptions, tradeoffs, failure modes, system boundaries, and migration plans.
  • Own ambiguous projects end-to-end: define the problem, propose a path, align across teams, ship production slices, measure, and iterate.
  • Improve the reliability, latency, correctness of systems that directly affect credit decisions and customer experience.
What we're looking for
  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience, preferably in a fast-moving environment.
  • Strong production backend experience with Node.js/TypeScript and Python.
  • Strong SQL skills and comfort working with relational databases, data warehouses, ETL/data pipelines, and messy real-world data.
  • Experience designing APIs, services, jobs, data models, and contracts that other teams depend on.
  • A track record of shipping systems where correctness, reliability, and operational clarity matter.
  • Experience working closely with data science, credit risk, analytics, or ML teams to productionize workflows, models, policies, or decision systems.
  • High agency and proactive: you do not need fully specified tickets, and you know how to create clarity when the problem is vague.
  • Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain tradeoffs, failure modes, and system boundaries across Engineer and Data Science.
  • Product judgment for internal users. You care whether the system actually improves underwriting decisions and workflows, not just whether the code shipped.
  • Experience with AWS, Postgres, Snowflake, queues, async jobs, observability tooling, and third-party financial APIs.
  • Excitement around building AI-native infrastructure and agentic workflows, both within the engineering team as well as broader credit and data science teams.
Strong pluses
  • Experience in payments infrastructure, or credit / cashflow decision systems.
  • Experience building policy engines, rules systems, scoring systems, pricing systems, analyst review tools, or operational decisioning platforms.
  • Experience productionizing ML models, monitoring model behavior, building eval workflows, or supporting human-in-the-loop review.
  • Experience with LLM or agent workflows for analyst automation, QA, monitoring, or evidence gathering.
  • Startup experience, especially in a high-ownership environment.
Why Slope
  • You will work on the core systems that determine how Slope understands risk, extends capital, and helps businesses grow.
  • You will have high ownership: small team, important surface area, real production impact.
  • You will report to the CEO and partner directly with Engineering, Risk, and Data Science.
  • You will help build the operating system for B2B credit: faster decisions, better workflows, stronger feedback loops, and scalable underwriting.

Slope is backed by top investors including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, and leading founders/operators across fintech and technology.

Other

Location: San Francisco preferred. Exceptional remote candidates in compatible time zones considered.

Level: Senior IC.

About Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a software as a service (SaaS) company that provides businesses with collaboration and work management tools. The company's platform allows teams to manage and automate workflows, projects, and processes. Smartsheet's software is used by over 90% of the Fortune 100 companies and has over 15 million registered users. The company was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.
Learn more about Smartsheet
Size
2,539 employees
Market Cap
$4.9 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$114.4 million
Founded
2005
5 Year Trend
+52.4%
Revenue
$354.1 million
NASDAQ

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