POSITION SUMMARYWe're looking for an exceptional Senior Staff Software Engineer to help define and evolve the Identity & Trust platform that enables secure, effortless access and trustworthy customer onboarding across EarnIn's expanding consumer and enterprise ecosystem. This role spans identity, authentication, authorization, identity verification, privacy, data protection, secure document processing, user/entity resolution, and fraud prevention. You'll architect foundational capabilities that are consumed across the company-from establishing that a customer is who they claim to be, to protecting their sensitive information, securely handling identity documents, and ensuring duplicate or abusive identities are detected and prevented.
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you'll operate at both a deep technical and organizational scale. You'll shape multi-year platform strategy, lead architecture across multiple teams, solve ambiguous and high-impact technical problems, and establish engineering patterns that allow teams across EarnIn to build trusted customer experiences safely and quickly. You'll also help define how AI and agentic engineering workflows can safely amplify engineering productivity, while establishing appropriate guardrails for security, privacy, correctness, and operational reliability. The base salary range for this full-time position is $279,000-$341,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. This hybrid position requires in-person work from our Mountain View HQ 2 days a week.
WHAT YOU'LL DO- Set Platform Strategy & Architecture: Define the technical vision, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for Identity & Trust, establishing scalable patterns across authentication, authorization, KYC/identity verification, PII protection, secure document processing, deduplication, and related trust capabilities.
- Lead High-Impact Technical Initiatives: Drive complex, ambiguous initiatives spanning multiple services and teams-from problem definition and architecture through implementation, rollout, and long-term operation.
- Build Secure, Resilient Infrastructure: Design highly available distributed systems and APIs using microservices, event-driven architectures, and technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, DynamoDB, and MySQL, with strong emphasis on security, privacy, reliability, and regulatory requirements.
- Evolve Identity & Trust Capabilities: Architect solutions for OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, identity federation, KYC, PII tokenization, data vaulting, secure file ingest/scanning, and user/entity deduplication.
- Create Organizational Leverage: Establish reusable architecture patterns, technical standards, APIs, documentation, and platform primitives that enable product teams to safely consume Identity & Trust capabilities without reinventing foundational security and compliance solutions.
- Drive Operational Excellence: Set the bar for reliability, observability, SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production readiness across critical Trust infrastructure.
- Advance AI-Powered Engineering: Lead the responsible adoption of agentic workflows and multi-agent systems to automate engineering, testing, debugging, operations, and analysis, with appropriate evaluation, security, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.
- Multiply Engineering Talent: Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, influence technical direction across organizations, and raise the bar through architecture reviews, technical RFCs, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.
- Partner Across the Company: Work closely with Product, Security, Risk, Data Science, Design, Analytics, Infrastructure, Compliance, and executive stakeholders to translate customer, business, security, and regulatory needs into durable technical strategies.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated progression into Staff/Senior Staff-level technical leadership.
- Proven track record defining and executing technical strategy for large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure.
- Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and delivery across multiple engineering teams and organizational boundaries, without relying on direct authority.
- Deep hands-on experience designing and operating secure, highly available distributed backend systems at scale.
- Strong expertise across identity, trust, security, privacy, or regulated-data systems, ideally spanning both consumer and enterprise experiences.
- Deep understanding of authentication and authorization protocols and patterns, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, identity federation, and token management.
- Experience architecting one or more Trust domains such as KYC/identity verification, fraud or risk systems, PII tokenization, data vaults, encryption, secure document/file processing, identity resolution, or user deduplication.
- Production experience with identity platforms such as Okta, Auth0, Keycloak, or comparable internally developed identity infrastructure.
- Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript, with the ability to work effectively across language boundaries.
- Deep experience with REST APIs, SQL/NoSQL data stores, Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms, Kubernetes, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
- Strong operational instincts, including experience with SLOs, observability, incident response, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production reliability for critical systems.
- Hands-on experience building AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including orchestration, tool use, evaluation, security boundaries, and guardrails.
- Exceptional architectural judgment and the ability to simplify complex systems while balancing security, privacy, reliability, scalability, developer experience, regulatory requirements, and speed of execution.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor senior technical talent and create leverage across an engineering organization.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, or similar tools) as part of your software development workflow
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical strategies to engineering, product, security, risk, and executive audiences.
- Experience in FinTech, regulated industries, identity, fraud, privacy, security, or compliance-sensitive environments is strongly preferred.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKESuccess in this role is measured by the technical leverage and trust infrastructure you create across EarnIn, not simply by the services you personally build. You will help establish a cohesive Identity & Trust platform that makes it easier for every product team to build secure customer experiences. You'll create durable architectural foundations for who a customer is, whether they can be trusted, what they can access, and how their most sensitive information is protected.
You'll anticipate scale, security, regulatory, and product challenges before they become organizational constraints; simplify fragmented capabilities into reusable platform primitives; and enable engineering teams to move faster without compromising trust or safety. You'll operate comfortably from deep technical implementation to company-level strategy-diving into code and production systems when necessary, leading architecture across teams, mentoring senior technical leaders, and establishing technical direction for some of EarnIn's most critical foundational capabilities.
#LI-Hybrid
A Note on AI in the Hiring Process: EarnIn may use Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tools during the hiring process, including tools that generate summaries or notes for interviewers, review resumes, assist with scheduling, or help identify themes across candidate responses and profiles for a given role. Final hiring decisions are made by human interviewers and hiring managers. If you have any concerns about the use of AI in our hiring process, please connect with your recruiter. With your consent, EarnIn may use AI tools to help transcribe or summarize interviews. Recordings are treated as confidential candidate data and are accessible only to authorized hiring personnel. Declining to be recorded will not negatively affect your candidacy or evaluation.
