Job Description:Lower is building technology that powers digital mortgage, home finance, automation, and AI-powered experiences across the homeownership journey.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of core services, systems, and architectural patterns across Lower's engineering organization. You'll operate as a technical leader across teams, helping scale our platforms, mentor engineers, and drive high-impact technical initiatives that improve both developer effectiveness and customer experience.
This is an opportunity to join a fintech company redefining the mortgage industry by combining data-driven insights with thoughtful user experiences. You'll work on impactful projects, collaborate with a talented team, and help us build scalable systems that directly improve how people achieve one of life's biggest milestones-owning a home.
Work Location: Hybrid in either Columbus, OH (preferred); Austin, TX
Work Type: Full-time W2 employment, visa sponsorship is not available for this position at this time.
What you'll do:Technical Skills- System design & architecture: Lead the design and evolution of scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems, driving architectural decisions across teams while balancing performance, cost, complexity, and long-term platform scalability.
- Code quality & testing: Strong in unit, integration, end-to-end testing, and test automation frameworks.
- Performance optimization: Proficiency in profiling, debugging, and optimizing application performance.
- DevOps & CI/CD: Experience with deployment pipelines, monitoring, observability, and release management.
- Security awareness: Knowledge of secure coding practices, threat modeling, and compliance requirements.
- Data & APIs: Comfortable designing and consuming APIs, working with databases, and handling data modeling.
- Tooling, automation & AI-assisted development: Skilled at improving developer workflows through automation (build systems, config management, test infrastructure) and modern AI-assisted engineering tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar technologies to accelerate development, debugging, testing, and documentation workflows.
Collaboration & Leadership- Stakeholder communication: Partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to translate strategic business initiatives into scalable technical solutions, clearly communicating tradeoffs, risks, and long-term architectural considerations.
- Mentorship: Coach junior and mid-level engineers, providing guidance on coding practices, system design, and career development.
- Code review: Promote best practices in readability, maintainability, and scalability through constructive code reviews, providing guidance and support.
- Engineering influence: Lead through technical influence, mentorship, and collaboration rather than direct authority, helping elevate engineering quality and decision-making across the organization.
- Cross-functional technical leadership: Drive alignment and technical execution across multiple engineering teams, fostering collaboration, reducing organizational friction, and promoting shared engineering standards and best practices.
Project & Execution- Technical program ownership: Lead large, ambiguous, or cross-functional technical initiatives from architecture through delivery, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability across systems and teams.
- Risk management: Identify risks early (technical debt, bottlenecks, scalability limits) and propose mitigations.
- Tradeoff negotiation: Weigh cost, scalability, and performance when evaluating solutions and clearly explain reasoning.
- Documentation: Produce and maintain high-quality technical documentation for systems, processes, and decisions.
- Organizational unblocker: Proactively identify and resolve technical, operational, or coordination roadblocks impacting engineering teams, improving delivery velocity and cross-team effectiveness.
- Continuous improvement: Identify systemic engineering bottlenecks, operational inefficiencies, and architectural gaps, driving initiatives that improve developer productivity, platform reliability, and organizational scalability.
Strategic Impact- Technical vision: Influence long-term technical direction, helping shape architecture and tech stack decisions.
- Technical leadership across teams: Serve as a technical leader across multiple engineering teams, helping establish architectural patterns, engineering standards, and shared platform direction.
- Innovation: Proactively identify opportunities for new technologies, frameworks, or approaches that benefit the business.
- Quality bar setting: Advocate for engineering excellence, ensuring the team balances speed with maintainability.
- Institutional knowledge & platform stewardship: Develop deep expertise in Lower's systems, infrastructure, and domain workflows, helping teams navigate technical complexity and make informed architectural decisions.
Who you are:- Full-stack expertise with proven ability to deliver high-quality backend and front-end solutions.
- Problem solver and innovator, with a track record of implementing new ideas and tackling complex technical challenges in design and architecture.
- Proficiency in our stack- TypeScript, React, AWS, Next.js, Node.js, C#/.NET, Go and Postgres -or the ability to quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and tools.
- Experience leveraging AI-assisted software development tools (such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, debugging, testing, and developer efficiency.
- Strong computer science foundations, including algorithms, data structures, concurrency, parallelism, asynchronous programming, networking, and system design.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams, lead architectural initiatives, and operate effectively in ambiguous or rapidly evolving environments.
- Strong track record of mentoring engineers, **scaling engineering best practices, and improving technical decision-**making within growing organizations.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills-someone who brings strong opinions held loosely, engages debate without ego, gives and receives feedback constructively, and helps foster a supportive engineering culture. We're looking for someone people want to design alongside.
- Prior experience in fintech, lending, or consumer financial products is a plus, but not required.
What you'll get:- Extended benefit offerings including medical/dental/vision, parental leave, life insurance, short- and long-term disability
- Paid holidays and paid time off
- 401K with company match
- Discount on home mortgage refinances or purchase
