Software Developer 2

Location: Centennial, CO (In-Office)
Company: RefiJet
Reports to: Director of Software Development

The Opportunity

RefiJet processes a high volume of auto refinance applications every month across a network of 30+ lending partners. The software running that operation spans borrower-facing applications, lender integrations, and internal tools used by our operations teams. The quality, reliability, and usability of that software directly affects real financial outcomes for real people.

Software Developer 2 is the level where you stop needing the work handed to you fully defined. You already know how to ship. This role is about widening what you can be trusted with: features that touch more than one system, requirements that arrive incomplete, and problems where the right answer is not obvious from the ticket. You will work across frontend applications, backend services, APIs, lender integrations, and internal operations tools.

This level carries in both directions. You are still learning, and you still have people invested in your development: structured code review, a manager whose job includes your growth, and senior engineers who will make you better when you use them. You are also now someone other people learn from. You will mentor Software Developer 1 engineers, review their code with care rather than speed, and answer the questions that are still hard when you are new to a codebase. Carrying someone else is part of the job at this level, not an extra.

We are deliberately stack and platform agnostic. We care that you can think clearly, learn a codebase quickly, and write code other engineers can build on. We do not care which language or framework you learned first. The specific technologies you will work in are covered in the interview process, and they will change over the course of your career here. The fundamentals will not.

Location and schedule. Plan on five days per week on site in Centennial, Colorado. We say that plainly instead of calling the role hybrid, because the mentoring and cross-team work this level depends on happens faster in person and because we would rather be clear now than surprise you at offer stage. One or two remote days per week may become available once you are established and performing well. You earn it, the Director of Software Development decides it, and no date is attached to it.

What You'll Do - Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Leadership

At this level, leadership means owning outcomes rather than tasks, and starting to make the engineers around you better.

• Own the features and components assigned to you end to end, including design decisions within an agreed approach, testing, release, and support after release
• Mentor Software Developer 1 engineers through pairing, code review, and onboarding, and treat their questions as part of your workload rather than an interruption
• Review code as a contributor of useful feedback, not a rubber stamp. Catch the design problem, not only the style problem.
• Push back on work that does not hold together, and propose the alternative rather than only naming the objection
• Estimate your own work with enough accuracy that others can plan around it, and communicate a slipping estimate before the date, not after
• Improve how the team works by strengthening documentation, tightening standards, and reducing recurring toil
• Represent engineering credibly in conversations with product, operations, and other internal partners, including explaining technical constraints in terms a non-engineer can act on

Discovery & Execution

• Deliver features across frontend applications, backend services, APIs, and internal tools, including work that spans more than one service or team boundary
• Take a requirement that is incomplete or ambiguous, ask the questions that make it concrete, and turn it into a workable plan before writing code
• Author specifications for your own work and review specifications written by others, under our spec-driven development practice in which a feature is specified in writing and agreed before it is built
• Design and build API integrations, including work with external lending partner systems, with attention to error handling, retries, idempotency, and failure modes
• Model and query data correctly, and understand the performance and integrity consequences of the schema and queries you write
• Write and maintain automated tests that give the team real confidence, and recognize when a test is protecting behavior rather than only raising coverage
• Debug production issues methodically, identify the actual cause, verify the fix, and record what you learned so the next person does not repeat it
• Participate in release, deployment, monitoring, and production support for the systems you build
• Use AI-assisted development tools as part of normal daily work, and remain fully accountable for every line you ship, whether you or a tool wrote it first

Growth & Optimization

What this level looks like when it is going well

• First 90 days: You are delivering defined features independently and your code review comments are useful to other people. You know the shape of our borrower, lender, and internal systems, and you can find your way into unfamiliar code without a guide.
• First 6 months: You take on a feature with unclear requirements and come back with a plan rather than a list of questions. You are the reviewer a Software Developer 1 wants on their pull request. You have improved something structural, not only shipped tickets.
• First year: You own a component or feature area that others rely on. You are trusted with work that touches lender integrations or borrower-facing flows. A Software Developer 1 is measurably better because of you, and you can name how.

What you will build skill in

• System design at feature and service scope, including the tradeoffs between the obvious approach and the durable one
• The business context behind our borrower, lender, and internal systems, deeply enough to spot when a requirement will not survive contact with reality
• Performance, observability, and reliability work, including reading production signals rather than guessing
• Secure development and correct handling of regulated borrower and lender data
• Mentoring as a distinct skill, including how to give feedback that lands and how to let someone struggle productively
• Technical writing, since specifications, design notes, and incident write-ups are how decisions survive past the conversation

Growth path

The ladder is Software Developer 1, Software Developer 2, Software Developer 3, Lead Software Developer. Each level has documented expectations. What separates them is the scope and independence of the work you can be trusted with, not years on your resume. You advance to Software Developer 3 when you can own ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, when your technical judgment is sought rather than checked, and when your effect on other engineers is visible. We promote from within, and we will tell you plainly where you stand against the next level.

Partnership & Compliance

• Work directly with product stakeholders and operations partners to shape features that solve real business problems, not only to receive requirements from them
• Coordinate with other engineers on work that crosses service or team boundaries, including agreeing on interfaces before both sides build
• Support QA, testing, release, and post-release validation so features work as intended before they reach users
• Follow and help enforce internal standards for source control, code quality, documentation, deployment, and team communication
• Handle borrower and lender data responsibly and follow all internal security, privacy, and data handling requirements. We operate in a regulated industry. Careful data handling is a condition of the role, not a preference.
• Never move production data into a non-production environment, share credentials, or work around a security control to save time. If a control is blocking legitimate work, escalate it and help fix the control.
• Contribute to a collaborative engineering culture by being dependable, communicative, and open to feedback

Required Skills & Experience

This list is short and every item on it is real. If you meet these, apply.

• Professional experience building and maintaining production web applications across both frontend and backend, with a track record of features you delivered end to end
• Working proficiency in a modern backend language and a modern frontend framework, with enough depth to debug problems in both
• Practical experience with REST APIs or service-to-service integration, including handling failures rather than only the happy path
• Practical experience with relational databases, including writing queries you can reason about and schema changes you can defend
• Experience writing automated tests and using them to ship with confidence
• Experience debugging issues in a running production system
• Comfortable working from written specifications, and able to identify when a specification is wrong or incomplete
• Version control fluency with Git and collaborative development workflows
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain a technical tradeoff to someone who is not an engineer
• Demonstrated ability to give and receive feedback constructively
• Legally authorized to work in the United States, and able to work on site in Centennial, CO five days per week

Education: No specific degree is required. A computer science or related degree, a bootcamp, self-directed learning, or equivalent practical experience are all acceptable paths. We evaluate demonstrated ability.

On experience level: This role is scoped for roughly 2 to 5 years of professional experience. Range is a proxy, not the bar. If you are outside it in either direction and the rest of this description fits, apply anyway and let us make the call.

Nice to Have

None of the following is required, and their absence will not remove you from consideration.

• Experience owning a feature area or service that other engineers depended on
• Experience mentoring or onboarding a more junior engineer
• Experience integrating with third-party or partner APIs where you did not control the other side
• Experience with containerized or cloud-hosted environments and the deployment pipeline that reaches them
• Experience with observability tooling, including tracing a real incident through logs and metrics
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools with good judgment about when to trust them
• Interest in fintech, lending platforms, or transaction-heavy software products
• Experience with auto lending, auto refinancing, or consumer credit products.
• Familiarity with loan origination systems (LOS), credit decisioning, or lending infrastructure.
• Experience working with external partners or B2B clients in a product-led organization.

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: $108,000 - $137,000 annually, commensurate with experience

Bonus: Eligible for an annual performance-based bonus with a defined target percentage of base salary, tied to company and individual goals.

Benefits: Comprehensive benefits including health, dental, vision, life insurance, 401(k), PTO, career development opportunities, and the chance to join Denver's Best Place to Work (2024 & 2025) with a dynamic culture focused on internal promotion and employee growth.