Software Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: 

 

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Software Engineer

Location: New York, NY
Company Stage of Funding: Series A / High Growth
Office Type: Hybrid — 4 days/week in-office, Monday–Thursday; WFH Friday
Salary: $180,000 – $230,000 + Competitive Equity
Equity: Competitive
Visa: Open to Visa Transfers — OPT and H-1B transfers supported; visa sponsorship generally not available except for exceptional candidates
Travel: Relocation assistance available; onsite interview travel covered up to $800

Company Description

Our client is building the financial infrastructure for the nonprofit sector, modernizing how charitable payments move between donors, financial institutions, and nonprofit organizations.

The company is building a new identity and payment network for nonprofits, with a mission to make charitable giving easier, more trustworthy, and more efficient.

The platform already processes billions of dollars in payment volume and is used by tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations, including major institutions across healthcare and charitable giving.

The company is backed by leading venture investors and operates in a fast-growing startup environment where engineers have significant ownership over architecture, infrastructure, and product direction.

The engineering team currently has approximately 12 engineers and is continuing to grow. Engineers work directly with founders, product leaders, and engineering leadership with minimal organizational layers.

The team intentionally avoids rigid product-line ownership, giving engineers the opportunity to work across the platform and contribute to a wide range of technical challenges.

The Software Engineer will join a highly autonomous engineering environment focused on backend systems, financial infrastructure, APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and scalable payment technology.

The ideal candidate has strong technical fundamentals, excellent communication, strong backend engineering experience, and the ability to learn complex financial and payments systems quickly.

What You Will Do

Backend & Platform Engineering

• Build and own backend server applications and components powering a financial payments platform
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain production backend systems
• Own systems end-to-end from architecture and implementation through production
• Build scalable and reliable APIs and backend services
• Work across REST APIs, gRPC, databases, distributed systems, and infrastructure
• Develop systems capable of reliably processing high-volume financial transactions
• Improve backend reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability
• Contribute to engineering standards, architecture decisions, and technical best practices
• Build services that interact with internal and external financial systems
• Work with production systems where correctness, reliability, and observability are critical
• Debug complex production issues and develop long-term solutions
• Improve system resilience and operational performance
• Take ownership of technical problems from initial investigation through production deployment

Infrastructure & Systems

• Work closely with infrastructure and engineering teams on production systems
• Build and maintain containerized applications using Docker
• Work with Kubernetes to deploy, operate, and scale production services
• Contribute to cloud infrastructure and AWS-based systems
• Work with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code where applicable
• Improve deployment processes, reliability, and engineering workflows
• Contribute to monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability systems
• Build systems that make production behavior easier to understand and diagnose
• Help establish infrastructure standards and best practices
• Participate in architecture discussions around scalability, reliability, and system design
• Evaluate technical tradeoffs across infrastructure, application architecture, and developer experience
• Improve the team's ability to safely deploy and operate production services

Product & Cross-Functional Engineering

• Collaborate directly with founders, product, and engineering leadership
• Participate in whiteboarding sessions and technical design discussions
• Contribute to technical decisions that shape what the team builds
• Work closely with other engineers across the platform
• Translate product requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Ask thoughtful questions and challenge technical assumptions when appropriate
• Bring strong technical opinions while remaining open to new information
• Balance engineering quality with product priorities and business requirements
• Work across different parts of the platform rather than being limited to a single product area
• Partner with product teams to understand user needs and technical requirements
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Help define engineering standards and best practices
• Contribute to code reviews, design reviews, and technical documentation
• Work in a collaborative environment where engineers are expected to contribute beyond implementation

Observability & Product Reliability

• Improve real-time monitoring and alerting across production systems
• Develop better visibility into application and user behavior
• Identify reliability and performance issues through system data
• Build tools and processes that make production systems easier to monitor
• Use logs, metrics, traces, and application data to investigate problems
• Help identify patterns in system behavior and production incidents
• Partner with product and engineering teams to use system insights to improve the platform
• Design systems with reliability, observability, and maintainability in mind
• Contribute to incident investigation and resolution
• Continuously improve production engineering practices

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 2–10 years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong backend engineering experience
• Experience building and owning scalable backend systems end-to-end
• Experience working at a reputable, growing technology company
• Experience working in a fast-moving engineering environment
• Strong experience developing production software
• Experience taking ownership of systems from design through deployment and maintenance
• Experience working closely with other engineers on architecture and technical decisions
• Experience working with production infrastructure and cloud environments
• Experience operating systems in production
• Experience working in environments where engineers have significant autonomy
• Experience at a venture-backed startup is strongly preferred
• Experience at a strong engineering organization comparable to companies such as Stripe or Capital One is preferred
• Fintech or payments infrastructure experience is preferred
• Experience working on financial infrastructure or transaction-heavy systems is a plus
• Experience building high-scale or high-reliability backend systems is a plus
• Candidates with 4+ years of experience should demonstrate strong technical ownership and architecture experience
• Candidates with 2–3 years of experience should demonstrate strong hands-on engineering ability and meaningful ownership of production systems
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to New York City
• Must be comfortable working in-office 4 days/week

Technical Requirements

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals
• Production experience with Docker
• Production experience with Kubernetes
• Strong understanding of backend architecture
• Experience building scalable backend services
• Experience with REST APIs
• Experience with distributed systems or service-oriented architectures
• Strong database fundamentals
• Experience working with PostgreSQL or comparable relational databases
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure
• Experience with AWS is preferred
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code is preferred
• Experience with Terraform is a plus
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and production engineering practices
• Ability to write maintainable, testable, production-quality code
• Strong debugging and problem-solving capabilities
• Ability to reason about system reliability and scalability
• Understanding of monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability
• Experience with gRPC is a plus
• Experience with Go is preferred
• Experience with Node.js is preferred
• Ability to understand unfamiliar systems quickly
• Ability to make thoughtful architecture and implementation decisions
• Strong understanding of APIs, services, databases, and infrastructure
• Comfortable participating in system design discussions
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs
• Strong testing and code-quality practices
• Experience deploying and operating production systems

Product & Engineering Requirements

• Strong understanding of how engineering decisions affect product outcomes
• Ability to translate product requirements into technical solutions
• Comfortable working closely with product and founders
• Ability to understand user and business requirements
• Strong product awareness for a software engineer
• Ability to work across different areas of a technical platform
• Comfortable solving ambiguous technical problems
• Ability to identify underlying technical problems rather than simply implementing requests
• Strong understanding of reliability requirements for financial systems
• Ability to think about correctness, security, scalability, and maintainability
• Comfortable working on systems where technical decisions have meaningful business impact
• Ability to understand complex financial or payments workflows
• Strong interest in learning the payments and financial infrastructure domain
• Comfortable contributing to product and architecture discussions
• Ability to communicate technical constraints and tradeoffs clearly
• Experience working with internal and external APIs
• Comfortable understanding complex integrations
• Ability to work across application, infrastructure, and system-level concerns
• Strong interest in building products that operate at real-world scale

Soft Skills

• Extremely high ownership and accountability
• Strong technical judgment
• Highly proactive and self-directed
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Strong problem-solving ability
• Strong analytical thinking
• Low-ego and collaborative working style
• Comfortable participating in technical debates
• Able to express strong technical opinions while remaining open-minded
• Comfortable receiving and incorporating feedback
• Strong attention to detail
• Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
• Strong bias toward action and execution
• Comfortable working directly with founders and senior leadership
• Comfortable working in a high-autonomy environment
• Strong ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly
• Comfortable working across different technical domains
• Resilient and adaptable in a fast-changing startup environment
• Motivated by meaningful ownership
• Strong engineering curiosity
• Strong communication and emotional intelligence
• Comfortable whiteboarding and discussing technical decisions
• Willing to take responsibility for systems in production
• Comfortable working quickly without sacrificing engineering quality

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $180,000 – $230,000
• Compensation may flex up to approximately $260,000 for exceptionally strong candidates
• Competitive equity
• Open to visa transfers, including OPT and H-1B transfers
• Visa sponsorship generally not available except for exceptional candidates
• Relocation assistance considered
• Onsite interview travel covered up to $800
• Opportunity to work on financial infrastructure processing billions of dollars in payment volume
• Opportunity to own backend systems end-to-end
• Direct collaboration with founders and engineering leadership
• Significant technical ownership and autonomy
• Opportunity to shape architecture and engineering standards
• Exposure to payments, fintech, financial infrastructure, and nonprofit technology
• Opportunity to work across the full technical platform rather than a narrowly defined product area
• Small, highly technical engineering team
• Fast-growing startup environment
• Opportunity to contribute directly to technical and product decisions
• Opportunity to work on high-scale, high-reliability production systems
• Strong exposure to backend engineering, infrastructure, distributed systems, and cloud technology

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join a rapidly growing technology company building financial infrastructure for the nonprofit sector.

The platform already processes billions of dollars in payment volume, giving engineers the opportunity to work on systems where reliability, correctness, scalability, and security directly matter.

You’ll join a small engineering team where engineers have meaningful ownership and direct access to founders and leadership.