Senior Backend Engineer

Role Description

You will work on the backend systems that power Slope’s embedded credit, payments, and underwriting. You should be excited by messy, important problems. Your job is to turn ambiguous problems and improvements into reliable production systems.

• Build and own production systems for underwriting, bank-data review, credit review workflows, portfolio monitoring.
• Create reusable infrastructure for evidence gathering, decisioning, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Build internal tools that help the credit risk team review data, understand decisions, handle exceptions, and move faster without sacrificing correctness.
• Clearly communicate technical assumptions, tradeoffs, failure modes, system boundaries, and migration plans.
• Own ambiguous projects end-to-end: define the problem, propose a path, align across teams, ship production slices, measure, and iterate.
• Improve the reliability, latency, correctness of systems that directly affect credit decisions and customer experience.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, preferably in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong production backend experience with Node.js/TypeScript.
• Strong SQL skills and comfort working with relational databases, data warehouses, ETL/data pipelines, and messy real-world data.
• Experience designing APIs, services, jobs, data models, and contracts that other teams depend on.
• Experience in payments infrastructure.
• A track record of shipping systems where correctness, reliability, and operational clarity matter.
• High agency and proactive: you do not need fully specified tickets, and you know how to create clarity when the problem is vague.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain tradeoffs and failure modes.
• Product judgment for internal users. You care whether the system actually improves underwriting decisions and workflows, not just whether the code shipped.
• Experience with AWS, Postgres, Snowflake, queues, async jobs, observability tooling, and third-party financial APIs.
• Excitement around building AI-native infrastructure and agentic workflows, both within the engineering team as well as broader credit and data science teams.
• Excited to experiment with AI tools.
• Strong plus: Startup experience, especially in a high-ownership environment.

Benefits

• You will work on the core systems that determine how Slope understands risk, extends capital, and helps businesses grow.
• You will have high ownership: small team, important surface area, real production impact.
• You will report to the CEO and work on mission-critical projects.
• You will help build the operating system for B2B credit: faster decisions, better workflows, stronger feedback loops, and scalable infrastructure.
• Slope is backed by top investors including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, and leading founders/operators across fintech and technology.

Other

• Location: San Francisco preferred. Exceptional remote candidates in compatible time zones considered.
• Level: Senior IC.