Technical Lead, Full Stack Engineer

ClassWallet, a leading financial technology company in the United States serving agencies delegated responsibility to manage public funds, is seeking to hire a Technical Lead, Full Stack Engineer to join our team. Agencies use ClassWallet to get public funds to the right people, and ensure the funds are used for the right purpose. ClassWallet's suite of products and services empowers agency administrators to dramatically increase efficiency of funds distribution and spend compliance, reduce programmatic costs, maximize the full potential impact of the program, and satisfy the needs and expectations of policymakers, constituents and public reporting. ClassWallet has processed over $6.7 billion to date and serves public agencies across 39 states. In its 11+ years in operation, ClassWallet has completed over 12M transactions, funded 1.1M recipients, processed over 5M applications, and now serves 300+ state and local agency clients, supported by a team of 280+ full-time staff. The Company has developed an industry-defining digital wallet solution which has gained rapid traction among state and local agencies and school districts across America. ClassWallet ranks as the 61st fastest growing software company on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies and the 21st fastest growing financial technology company on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 in 2023. While the Company delivers immense business value, the social impact of ClassWallet is a fabric that runs through its mission and corporate culture. As a result of ClassWallet’s innovation, public programs run with exponentially more efficiency and the impact and breadth of the programs for the individuals they serve is dramatically higher. This mission complements the Company's mission-based culture with focus on gratitude and work-life balance. About the Role Core Services builds the foundation the rest of ClassWallet's platform is built on and the new products that run on top of it. It's a small team that owns both the specification and the delivery of the reusable standards, services and components that multiple applications, built by independent teams, depend on to move quickly. You'll build customer-facing applications on a modern stack, and you'll build the shared services underneath them that let every other engineering team do the same: financial ledger and payments, authentication and access control, workflow and approvals, job orchestration, feature delivery, data modeling, and internationalization. The value of a Core Service is measured by adoption, so you'll own each one the whole way: API design, client SDK, deployment, observability, documentation, and the hands-on partnership that gets other teams onto it successfully. We're also rethinking how software gets built here, and we want this role leading that. You'll work with agentic development tooling as a primary part of your workflow and help establish the specifications, harnesses, test strategies and review practices that let AI-assisted engineering land at production quality and scale across the organization. Because Core Services owns the layer everything depends on, the mandate is deliberately broad. Data model design and long-term evolution, CI/CD automation, and build and test infrastructure are part of the charter rather than side projects, and you'll partner closely with our QA, Platform and Security teams on all three. This is a hands-on individual contributor role reporting into the architecture organization. What you'll do

• Build greenfield internal services from zero to production and then to broad adoption across multiple engineering teams
• Design and build new customer-facing applications in React, Next.js and TypeScript, backed by services you also own
• Build administration backends, configurable workflow tooling and other developer-facing surfaces so application teams can lean on shared primitives instead of rebuilding them
• Own durable API contracts: versioning, backward compatibility, published SDKs, and migrations that ship without downtime
• Organize and curate reusable components to lead other engineers to the right patterns.
• Design and evolve data models across PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB as the domain and the business change
• Operate what you build: SLOs, instrumentation, alerting and incident follow-through in Datadog
• Advance our agentic development practice and the delivery automation, coverage and testing infrastructure that supports it
• Write the RFCs, design docs and integration guides that other teams build against, and mentor the engineers who consume your services
Requirements Education
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field (or equivalent combination of education and hands-on practical experience).
Overall Experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience across the full SDLC, with significant depth in backend and platform work
• Demonstrated experience owning production enterprise systems over multi-year horizons. We're looking for engineers who have versioned a widely-used interface, run a real deprecation cycle, migrated consumers onto a new platform, and kept a critical system healthy while the business changed around it
• Track record of taking a service from initial design to production and then to adoption by other teams
• Comfort building consensus across teams without formal authority: negotiating migration timelines, running design reviews, and making a technical case in writing
• Proven experience mentoring junior engineers, understanding stakeholders, and adapting the communication according to the right audience.
• Fluency with agentic and AI-assisted development in real production workflows, with full ownership of and accountability for the resulting code
Technical Experience
• TypeScript end to end , used as a design tool: discriminated unions, generics with meaningful constraints, branded types for identifiers and monetary values, and runtime validation at trust boundaries with types inferred from schema
• Modern JavaScript adopted in practice Node streams with pipeline() and async iteration, native fetch with AbortSignal, AsyncLocalStorage for request context, await using for resource lifecycles, iterator helpers and native grouping and set operations, error cause chains, function composition and currying, ESM with top-level await
• Node.js and NestJS at depth: dependency injection, module boundaries, guards, interceptors and lifecycle hooks. Deep Express or Fastify experience with strong DI fundamentals is an acceptable substitute
• React and Next.js : hooks, App Router, server components, SSR/CSR tradeoffs and typed clients
• Authentication integration in practice : NextAuth and Auth0 federation, session and token handling across multiple applications, organizations and identity providers
• API design as a durable contract : REST and/or GraphQL, idempotency, pagination, contract testing, semantic versioning discipline
• Polyglot persistence with real modeling judgment : PostgreSQL or MySQL for transactional, money-bearing data (indexing, isolation levels, constraints, safe migrations) and MongoDB for flexible and versioned documents, plus the experience to argue which data belongs where
• Asynchronous and event-driven systems : RabbitMQ, SQS or Kafka; idempotent consumers, delivery guarantees, dead-letter handling
• Testing as leverage : Jest, Supertest, Playwright or Cypress, Testcontainers; designing seams that make systems testable
• Cloud-native delivery : AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions and CD tooling; able to instrument a service and define its SLOs
• AI-ready engineer : Knows how to use AI effectively, its limitations, and how to mitigate the shortcomings to reduce the risk, while understanding the role of a human in the loop.
Preferred Qualifications
• Financial systems depth: immutable double-entry ledgers, reconciliation, NACHA / ACH origination and return handling, WORM and append-only retention data models, payment processor integrations, or balance integrity guarantees
• Identity and access: OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, SAML, multi-tenant RBAC, MFA and token lifecycle including experience implementing an OIDC provider rather than only consuming one
• Compliance-constrained engineering: SOC 2, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP/GovRAMP, PCI-DSS or FIPS 140-3, including secret and key management and dependency vulnerability management at scale (Snyk or equivalent)
• Workflow and rules engines: state machines, approval routing, SLA tracking, auditable status history
• Platform and developer experience: internal SDKs, scaffolding and codegen, service catalogs, reusable CI workflows
• Feature flagging and progressive delivery; white-labeling and internationalization in multi-tenant SaaS
• Public-sector or GovTech experience, where auditability, records retention and data privacy are first-class requirements
• Open-source contribution to the Node, TypeScript or Nest ecosystems
Key Performance Goals Adoption Success is measured by whether other teams run on what you build: applications migrated onto each service, time-to-first-successful-integration for a new consumer, and how much of that onboarding is self-service. Shipping is the midpoint of the project, not the end. Reliability of Shared Infrastructure Own the operational quality of your services: defined SLOs, meaningful instrumentation and alerting, graceful degradation, and incidents that get root-caused and don't recur. Interface Stewardship Over Time Keep contracts stable and evolvable: versioning consumers can plan around, deprecations completed on schedule, migrations executed without downtime, and documentation that stays true as the service changes. Delivery Velocity Deliver measurable improvements to how quickly and safely the whole organization ships: build and test duration, suite reliability, release automation, and the maturity of our agentic development practice. Technical Influence & Mentorship Raise the engineering bar beyond your own code through design reviews, reference implementations other teams adopt, and mentorship. Benefits ClassWallet is a positive, family-oriented team environment. Our focus is on encouragement, positive reinforcement, and gratitude. We work hard and are highly motivated to win but with a healthy perspective on life. We offer an excellent salary and benefits commensurate with experience. ClassWallet.com is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants are considered for all positions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status.