Staff Software Engineer, Payment Platform [Remote]

Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.

Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

The Role:

Cedar is seeking a staff engineer to embed in the Payments Platform team and lead technical strategy across multiple related squads. The Payments Platform squad is responsible for building and maintaining the core payment processing infrastructure that powers all Cedar applications and ensures seamless transactions for our patients. This isn’t a typical Staff role—you’ll own the systems that power money movement from authentication through settlement, shaping how millions of patients experience paying for care.

The Kinds of Problems You'll Solve:

• Lead the development of high-impact projects in the Payment product space .
• Bring clarity to highly ambiguous projects and ensure we are building for long-term scalability and robustness. 
• Develop a deep understanding of payment lifecycles and vendors' functionalities, identify improvement opportunities to streamline the payment experience and reduce cost .
• Collaborate with your counterparts on the product, design, and commercial teams to understand patient challenges and formulate technical strategies to address them.
• Drive key technical initiatives such as invoice payment decoupling . 
• Evaluate build vs buy tradeoffs, influence vendor strategy, and advocate for what’s best for patients and the business.
• Mentor engineers at all levels and uplevel them through training and sharing best practices. 
• Drive org-level changes to improve existing processes, infrastructure, architecture, business problems, team well-being, and development satisfaction, etc.

Why this role matters:

Payments are the backbone of Cedar’s platform. Every failed authorization or brittle integration translates into real cost for patients and providers. By modernizing Cedar’s payments platform, you’ll reduce friction for patients, save providers money, and establish durable payment integration patterns that scale across the company.

Who you are:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience.  
• Proven track record as a backend architect—designing APIs, services, and event-driven systems that scale reliably.
• A demonstrated track record of leading large technical projects that span multiple engineering teams and require multi-functional teamwork.
• Experience leading vendor integrations, especially building a platform with various vendor integrations with consolidation. 
• Experience raising standards across teams—mentoring not just juniors but also senior engineers through code/design review, setting patterns, and influencing architecture forums.
• Ability to scale solutions and build for long-term supportability
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to drive projects from ideation through to completion
• Experience collaborating with both technical and non-technical cross-functional teams
• A natural inclination for ownership with a bias-for-action mindset
• Excitement about our mission and a passion for solving problems to improve the healthcare financial experience
• Payments experience sets ahead, but is not required.

What this role is not:

• Infra-only engineers without product engineering experience shipping to end users
• Data-pipeline–only or infra/DevOps-heavy profiles
• Frontend-heavy engineers or those seeking a 50/50 full-stack role
• Candidates without meaningful vendor integration experience

Compensation Range and Benefits:

• Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $216,750 - $280,000
• This role is equity eligible
• This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

*Subject to location, experience, and education

#LI-Remote #LI-JJ2

What do we offer to the ideal candidate?

• A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
• Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
• For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
• 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
• Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: View email address on swooped.co (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians) 
• Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
• Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
• Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally

About us 

Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.