Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About Finch

We are on a mission to revolutionize employment by building the infrastructure that powers every facet of work. To do this, we're looking for individuals who think about problems holistically and in-depth, who are relentlessly curious, self-starters, and determined to drive ideas from inception through to completion.

Finch is a Series B company backed by a fantastic set of firms, angels, and our developers including General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, Homebrew, BoxGroup, YCombinator, Charley (1st business hire at Plaid), Sima (ex-Head of Biz Dev at Plaid), Henrique + Pedro (co-CEOs at Brex), Jeff + Wayne (co-CEOs at Digits), Immad (CEO at Mercury), Sam (CEO at Vouch Insurance), Karim (CTO at Ramp), and more.

About Our Team

We're a team of problem solvers who aren't afraid to challenge assumptions. We value velocity, curiosity, empathy, and diverse perspectives. Everyone on the team is excited about the scope of the problems we address and the potential impact our work can have on the global workforce. We realize that the value we provide comes with great responsibilities, and therefore make security and privacy our highest priorities.


We come from a diverse set of backgrounds and each member brings different skills to the group. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and potential will stand out-and set you apart-especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns.


About You

You love breaking down complex problems to deliver elegant experiences to customers. You possess a balance of technology and people skills with a high degree of empathy. You thrive on cutting through areas of high ambiguity, narrowing down high-level problems into engineering solutions.

You're able to coordinate across product, engineering, and support teams to ensure that you're delivering the right solution for the right problem and that all parties are aligned. You value your customers and your peers and want to succeed as a team.

You're comfortable wearing many hats and aren't afraid to execute. You're excited by working on an API product that powers many of the world's most impactful applications.


What You'll Do

• Live by and champion our values: empathy, execution, humility, curiosity.
• Design, build, and maintain powerful services to enable processing high volumes of data across a wide array of complex employment system integrations.
• Influence organizational direction by driving alignment on strategic initiatives and architectural best practices and leading by example.
• Lead the charge on product reliability and expansion initiatives, including horizontal expansion of existing integrations to increase data coverage and depth as well as greenfield development in entirely new product verticals.
• Lead large initiatives that may span across multiple teams, including activities ranging from problem definition to engineering scoping to execution to ensure the successful and smooth delivery of valuable and impactful solutions for our customers.
• Deploy code daily.
• Understand roadmap priorities and build systems focused on scalability, testability, and maintainability.
• Quickly debug issues throughout our stack using modern observability tooling and your solid foundation of engineering knowledge.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years of relevant backend development experience in a high growth environment.
• Customer-obsessed mindset. Customer needs always take priority.
• Track record of executing and delivering on large projects with high ambiguity.
• Detail-oriented approach to large scale challenges with the ability to work cross-functionally and cross-team as needed to drive initiatives from inception through to launch.
• Strong, but loosely held, opinions of what it takes to build a healthy and smooth operating engineering organization.
• A collaborative mindset with experience mentoring and leveling up engineers around you.
• Exposure to high-growth start-ups. You thrive in fast-moving environments where your work directly impacts company success.
• Technical understanding of the software development process.
• Excellent written and oral business communication and people skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders, including technical peers, leaders, and executive management.

Success Looks Like

• Deep experience working with APIs and back end technologies.
• Strong system-design skills and deep expertise working with distributed systems.
• Knowledge of data tools and ETL/ELT processes
• Experience working with NodeJS, PostgreSQL, Redis.
• Familiar with various API authentication and authorization methods; particularly OAuth.
• Experience using a cloud provider. AWS is a bonus.
• Strong knowledge of testing frameworks and best practices. TDD is strongly encouraged.

What We Offer

• Competitive equity with a 10-year exercise window
• Full medical, dental, and vision coverage (100% for employees, 85% for dependents)
• Unlimited PTO (with a 3-week minimum)
• 401(k) plan
• Regular team offsites and meetups
• Hybrid work: 2+ days/week in our SF or NYC

$220,000 - $240,000 a year

Finch's compensation package includes a competitive base salary benchmarked against real-time market data, as well as equity for all full-time roles. We want all full time employees to be invested in Finch and to be able to take advantage of that investment, so our equity grants include a 10-year exercise window.

We also offer exceptional benefits, and, for applicable roles, commissions plans. Our minimum salary range for this role is: $220,000 - $240,000.

Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on geography, candidate experience and expertise, and other factors.

Finch is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances.


Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.