Staff Software Engineer - FinTech Prestigious Startup

Job description

Staff Software Engineer

Our Client | AI-Native Banking Platform San Francisco, CA (On-site)

$185K – $255K base + competitive equity

US citizens preferred (no new H-1B sponsorship; case-by-case H-1B transfers possible)

About Our Client Our Client is building AGI for banking — replacing decades-old legacy systems with AI-native technology that automates 90% of manual work in small business lending and loan origination. They deliver a compliant, responsible AI Loan Origination System (LOS) for FDIC-insured banks, regional lenders, and non-bank lenders — enabling instant pre-qualification, superhuman underwriting, document analysis (10,000+ pages), 24/7 AI Loan Assistant, and massive cycle-time reduction. Founded in 2023 by Stanford banking + ML experts. Backed by Y Combinator, Peterson Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, The Sarah Smith Fund, and others. ~$33M raised. Team of 35, high-intensity startup environment in SF.

The Role We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer (7+ years product-focused engineering) to act as a force multiplier: a holistic technical leader bridging code, people, and business outcomes while mentoring juniors and driving engineering excellence. You will have outsized impact on product, organization, and culture as the company scales.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architectural decisions and own complex, cross-team initiatives — balancing long-term system stability with the high velocity required in a Series A startup.

• Spend ~70% hands-on coding and ~30% on technical leadership & mentorship for one of the core product teams (Applicant, Lender, or Platform).

• Mentor and develop junior engineers; amplify team skills, vision, and best practices.

• Collaborate across engineering, product, and leadership to ensure a cohesive, high-quality system; transplant learnings organization-wide.

• Potentially interact directly with customers / customer-facing teams during working sessions to gather requirements and validate that the highly configurable platform meets real needs in regulated lending.

Job requirements

Must-Have Experience & Skills

• 7+ years product-focused software engineering.

• Staff Engineer (or equivalent) at a Series A or B startup .

• Proven track record delivering significant projects in fast-paced, production SaaS environments.

• Experience in regulated industries (FinTech, Healthcare, or similar).

• Quality-first mentality with bias for action — understands trade-offs between “doing it right” and “doing it now”.

• Holistic understanding of web architectures , relational databases (PostgreSQL), and distributed cloud platforms (AWS).

• Tech stack alignment : TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS.

• Clear, succinct, precise communication.

• Experience mentoring junior engineers and working directly with customers / customer-facing teams.

• Thrives in fast-paced, high-intensity startup environments.

Traits to Avoid

• Exclusively Big Tech or late-stage (late Series C+) experience.

• Job hopping (more than two roles under one year).

• Focused primarily on low-level firmware or foundational model training.

Why Join Our Client

• Shape the future of banking with AI — help create a new category that automates 90% of manual lending work.

• Staff-level role with heavy hands-on coding + genuine technical leadership.

• Own significant parts of a complex, enterprise-grade system.

• Mentor juniors and directly influence engineering culture and excellence.

• Work with a mission-driven team backed by top-tier VCs in a high-growth AI fintech.

Equal Employment Opportunity

TopTechTalent.ai believes that all persons are entitled to equal employment opportunities. TopTechTalent.ai recruits, hires, trains, promotes, disciplines and provides other conditions of employment without regard to a person's race, color, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, or expression, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, marital status or other classifications protected under law or Company policy. This includes providing reasonable accommodation for team members' disabilities or religious beliefs and practices.

The government requires TopTechTalent.ai to maintain information on those who seek employment with the company, including their race and sex. Accordingly, to help us comply with this requirement, we encourage you to provide us with the following self-identification information. However, submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not affect your opportunity for employment or terms and conditions of employment, if hired. If you do submit this information, it will be kept confidential and will be used in the compilation of data for reporting requirements.

🚫 Third-party recruiters, please do not reach out for this role.

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