The Team

We're a small, tight-knit team working together in person in downtown San Francisco. Our team brings together deep expertise in engineering and finance. We've built accounting systems at Affirm, ledgers at Stripe and Robinhood, launched products from 01, scaled infrastructure processing billions of dollars, built finance functions, and closed the books under real operating pressure.

We understand our customers because we have been in their shoes. Quanta's earliest product was built around a few principles we still value: get to learning as quickly as possible, find the simplest solution that works, and build alongside real users and real-world edge cases.

Quanta is for people who want ownership, prioritize learning and outcomes over conventional playbooks, and are comfortable figuring things out as they go. We move quickly, but we are building systems where correctness and trust matter deeply. That tension-moving fast while building durable foundations-is at the heart of the engineering problems we work on.

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll work on the foundational systems that Quanta's product and engineering teams build on top of. You'll own problems where architecture, correctness, reliability, and developer leverage matter-and where the right abstraction can unlock an entire category of product capabilities.

You'll operate across team boundaries, identifying the technical investments that matter most and driving them from ambiguous problem to production.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and owning complex backend, platform, or distributed systems in production.
• Deep backend and distributed systems experience, particularly with systems where correctness, reliability, and data integrity matter.
• Strong systems thinking, including API design, data modeling, system boundaries, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
• Excellent technical judgment and the ability to distinguish between problems that require durable infrastructure and those where the simplest solution is the right one.
• Strong debugging instincts and comfort working through difficult problems across application, data, and infrastructure layers.
• Ability to create clarity from ambiguity and independently identify the highest-leverage technical problems to solve.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, particularly when translating complex technical tradeoffs for engineers and non-engineers.
• A hands-on mindset. You want to design systems and build them.

Bonus points for experience with financial systems, ledgers, accounting infrastructure, data platforms, developer platforms, or other systems where correctness and auditability are critical. You are excited about working in person with a collaborative team in San Francisco.

This Role Is Not for You If...

• You want a Staff role primarily focused on architecture, planning, or technical strategy rather than writing and operating production code.
• You prefer clearly defined problems and established technical roadmaps rather than identifying what needs to be built.
• You reach for sophisticated abstractions before understanding the underlying problem. We value durable systems, but we also value simplicity.
• You optimize for speed by accepting known gaps in correctness or reliability. Trust matters deeply in the systems we build.
• You are uncomfortable working in a complex, judgment-heavy domain where the right technical model requires understanding the underlying business context.
• You think of platform engineering primarily as infrastructure or developer tooling. Our platform sits directly underneath the product and the financial systems our customers rely on.
• You are primarily interested in AI as a standalone feature rather than building the systems, constraints, and primitives that make AI useful and trustworthy.
• You prefer working independently or remotely from product engineers and domain experts. This team works closely and in person by design.

Benefits

• Competitive early-stage salary
• Competitive early-stage equity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Take-what-you-need paid vacation
• Commuter benefits
• Wellness stipend
• Paid lunches and dinners in the office
• All the equipment and tools you need to do your best work