We are seeking a highly motivated Staff Software Development Engineer to be the hands-on technical lead for a product domain within our consumer lending platform. This role owns the architecture and delivery of secure, scalable platform services on cloud infrastructure, and brings AI capabilities into those services safely and in compliance with financial-services regulation.
The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering expertise with a strong understanding of cloud-native technologies, distributed systems, and the unique challenges of fintech, including security, compliance, data privacy, and transaction reliability. As a Staff Engineer, you will partner with Product, Data, Risk, Compliance, and Security, mentor SDEs and Senior SDEs, and contribute to the engineering standards set by our Principal engineers and architecture group.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Own the technical direction, architecture, and implementation for your product domain, spanning 1–3 teams.
- Apply and evolve engineering standards, best practices, and architectural principles within your domain, and contribute to org-wide standards set by Principal engineers.
- Drive cloud-native, API-first, and event-driven designs that align with the enterprise architecture.
- Partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Risk, Compliance, and Security teams to deliver scalable business solutions.
- Evaluate emerging technologies for your domain and recommend solutions that improve performance, security, and operational efficiency, escalating cross-cutting choices to Principal SDEs and Architecture.
- Lead technical delivery of modernization initiatives and customer-facing applications within your domain.
Software Development
- Design, develop, test, and deploy high-quality supporting critical lending operations.
- Build resilient systems capable of processing high-volume transactions with strong reliability and performance requirements.
- Develop and maintain microservices, APIs, event-driven workflows, and cloud-native applications.
- Lead code reviews and uphold software quality standards for your teams.
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues affecting business-critical systems.
- Optimize applications for scalability, availability, maintainability, and customer experience.
AI First Development
- Integrate LLM services (such as AWS Bedrock or OpenAI APIs) into backend services, including prompt design, response handling, and guardrails.
- Build retrieval pipelines on PostgreSQL with pgvector, extending our existing relational data platform.
- Deploy and monitor ML and AI model inference on AWS, including latency, cost, quality, and drift.
- Ensure AI features meet data privacy, security, and compliance requirements, including handling of customer PII, auditability of AI outputs, and fair-lending obligations.
FinTech Platform Development
- Design systems for your domain across lending, servicing, payments, customer onboarding, collections, or credit decisioning.
- Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Audit stakeholders to ensure systems meet regulatory and governance requirements.
- Implement secure software development practices and ensure adherence to data privacy standards.
- Support integrations with third-party financial service providers, payment processors, identity verification services, and credit bureaus.
- Build data-driven solutions that enhance customer acquisition, underwriting, servicing, and portfolio performance.
Engineering Excellence
- Champion CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps best practices.
- Drive improvements in observability through logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting solutions.
- Reduce technical debt and improve system maintainability within your domain.
- Track metrics for service performance, reliability, and engineering productivity in your domain.
- Lead root cause analysis and remediation efforts following incidents in your domain.
Mentorship & Collaboration
- Mentor SDEs and Senior SDEs on technical design, code quality, and delivery.
- Partner with Engineering Managers on delivery planning, roadmap input, and technical priorities.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding engineering talent.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership and business stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
- 12+ years of professional software development experience with progressive technical leadership responsibilities, including technical lead responsibility for a team or domain.
- Experience designing and supporting large-scale, customer-facing software platforms.
- Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages including Java, C#, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript
- Experience building cloud-native applications in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Strong understanding of: Distributed systems, Microservices architecture, Event-driven architecture, RESTful APIs, Database design and optimization
- Experience with relational (ideally PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases.
- Expertise in CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and DevOps practices.
- Exceptional problem-solving and communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience within fintech, consumer lending, banking, payments, or financial services industries.
- Experience supporting regulated environments and compliance frameworks.
- Knowledge of financial transactions, ACH processing, payment gateways, underwriting systems, loan servicing, or digital banking platforms.
- Experience with vector search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), including pgvector, embeddings, and chunking strategies.
- Experience with LLM evaluation, guardrails, and responsible-AI practices such as PII redaction, explainability, and bias testing.
- Experience with ML model serving on AWS (e.g., SageMaker or Bedrock).
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS/EKS, and container orchestration technologies.
- Familiarity with data engineering or risk analytics platforms.
- Experience working with high-availability systems serving millions of customer transactions.
- Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud)
Core Competencies
- Technical Expertise
- Software Architecture
- Distributed Systems Design
- Cloud Engineering
- API & Microservices Development
- Security-First Development
- AI Engineering
- LLM Integration
- Retrieval Pipelines
- Prompt & Guardrail Design
- Model Inference Operations
- Responsible AI
- Leadership
- Domain Technical Ownership
- Strategic Thinking
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Mentorship & Coaching
- Decision Making
- FinTech Domain Knowledge
- Financial Systems
- Lending & Payments Platforms
- Regulatory Compliance Awareness
- Data Privacy & Security
- Risk & Fraud Prevention
