Staff Product Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

The Problem We're Solving

Most people don't think twice about going to the doctor. But for over 85 million uninsured and underinsured Americans — the cashiers, drivers, home health aides, and construction workers who keep this country running — getting care is complicated, expensive, and often out of reach.

Vitable is the health benefits platform designed for every worker. We make it easy for employers to offer real, high-quality healthcare to their teams — not watered-down coverage, but benefits that actually work. It's better for employees. It's smarter for employers. And it matters.

We're a small, passionate team moving fast and solving a problem that genuinely deserves solving. If you're looking for a place where your work has a tangible impact on real people's lives, you've found it.

This is a senior technical leadership role for an engineer who has built the systems behind money at scale: ledgers, reconciliation engines, payment rails, compliance-critical workflows. You've operated in fintech environments where inaccuracy has consequences, auditability is non-negotiable, and downtime carries real cost. You know what it takes to build systems that financial regulators can inspect and that operations teams can trust.

You'll partner with Product, Finance, Operations, and Engineering leadership to own the design and delivery of Vitable's most critical financial and transactional infrastructure — and influence how engineering is practiced across the company.

Within your first year, you will:

• Own and deliver multiple company-critical financial infrastructure initiatives — on time, with a high bar for reliability and auditability.
• Materially improve the integrity, observability, and scalability of Vitable's payment and transactional systems.
• Raise the technical bar: stronger design reviews, clearer architectural patterns, better-tested and more traceable systems.
• Be the person the team reaches for when the problem is hard, ambiguous, or high-stakes.
• Build systems that can support Vitable's next phase of growth while maintaining the trust of our customers, partners, and regulators.

• Design and own the systems that move, track, and reconcile money — including payment rails, ledgering, invoicing, and carrier settlement workflows.
• Build bank-agnostic architectures that can integrate with multiple payment processors, banking partners, and financial data providers.
• Ensure data integrity, idempotency, and correctness across all transactional systems, with end-to-end auditability and traceability built in from day one.
• Lead initiatives to improve observability and operational reliability in high-stakes financial workflows.

• Drive architectural decisions across multiple product and engineering teams, setting a high bar for reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
• Establish technical standards and engineering practices — from system design to code review — that scale with the organization.
• Serve as a force multiplier: mentor engineers, run design reviews, and help the team grow into harder problems.
• Lead complex, multi-team initiatives from concept through deployment and long-term ownership.

• Build systems that meet the requirements of regulated environments — including HIPAA, SOC 2, and financial compliance frameworks such as PCI or state insurance regulations.
• Design audit trails, compliance controls, and reporting mechanisms that satisfy both internal and external stakeholders.
• Partner with legal, compliance, and finance teams to translate regulatory requirements into durable technical solutions.

• Collaborate closely with Product, Finance, and Operations to understand business challenges and translate them into scalable, resilient systems.
• Influence product strategy through deep technical context — surfacing tradeoffs, flagging risks, and identifying platform leverage points.
• Balance speed with architectural health; know when to move fast and when to slow down and do it right.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience at the Staff Engineer level or equivalent senior individual contributor scope.
• A track record of leading and delivering large-scale, cross-team technical initiatives in production environments.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems: service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, async processing, and high-availability infrastructure.
• Proven ability to influence without authority and build alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.

• Hands-on experience building payment platforms, money movement systems, financial ledgers, or banking integrations at meaningful scale.
• Deep understanding of transactional integrity, idempotency, financial reconciliation, and audit trail design.
• Experience with bank-agnostic or multi-rail payment architectures — ACH, wire, card networks, or similar.
• Familiarity with compliance controls relevant to financial platforms: KYC/AML workflows, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or equivalent regulated environments.
• Strong intuition for where money movement systems fail — and how to build defensively against it.

Backend

• Expert-level Python experience; strong command of Django and Django REST Framework.
• Deep understanding of API design, distributed systems, and event-driven / asynchronous processing patterns.

Frontend

• Strong proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript ; experience with Vue.js or React.
• Ability to contribute full-stack when needed.

Data & Infrastructure

• Advanced SQL; PostgreSQL schema and data model design for transactional and reporting workloads.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (including infrastructure-as-code).
• Strong observability instincts: monitoring, alerting, tracing, and incident management tooling.
• Event-driven architecture experience: messaging systems (e.g., Kafka, SQS, Celery) and event sourcing patterns.

• Experience scaling financial platforms that process billions in transaction volume.
• Background in fintech, insurtech, healthcare payments, payroll, or benefits administration.
• Platform engineering or infrastructure tooling experience.
• Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD) practices.

We believe in taking care of the people who take care of our members. Here's what that looks like:

• 100% Silver Plan medical coverage — plus dental and vision
• Vitable Primary Care membership — the same care we give our members, yours too
• 401(k) and life insurance
• Unlimited PTO — and we actually mean it
• Remote-first — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• MacBook and home office setup stipend — the gear you need to do great work
• Competitive equity — you're building something real, you should own a piece of it

We don't have a big corporate machine behind us. What we have is a clear mission, a lot of heart, and a deep sense of urgency about the problem we're solving. That means we move fast, figure things out, and hold ourselves to a high bar — not because someone's watching, but because we care.

You'll thrive here if you're the kind of person who:

• Feels personally connected to making healthcare more accessible
• Gets energized by building, not just maintaining
• Can navigate ambiguity without losing momentum
• Does the unglamorous work when it needs doing — and does it well
• Asks for help when you need it and offers it when you see someone else does
• Cares about the details, but keeps sight of the bigger picture

We're a team that shows up for each other. We celebrate wins together, work through hard problems together, and genuinely like each other. If something feels off, we say so. If someone's struggling, we notice.

No egos. No jerks. Just good humans doing meaningful work — and having fun doing it.

The people we serve are diverse — and our team should be too. We're committed to building a workplace where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives aren't just welcomed, they're essential to the work.

Vitable is an equal opportunity employer. We don't hire to check boxes. We hire people who care about what we're building and bring something real to the table.

If this role excites you but you don't meet every requirement on the list, please apply anyway. We mean that.