Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About Finch

We are on a mission to empower innovators to access the global employment ecosystem and connect the world's employers under a single API. 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 but that end users may never know exists.

What You'll Do

• Live by and champion our values: empathy, execution, humility, curiosity.
• Design, build, and maintain powerful services to enable Finch’s data presentation layer.
• Lead the charge on product expansion initiatives, including horizontal expansion of existing integrations to increase data coverage and depth as well as greenfield development in entirely new product verticals.
• Develop, test, and maintain integrations to meet security, scalability, and performance requirements to ensure that our services run reliably and efficiently at scale.
• Lead large product 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 write code 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 start-up environment.
• Track record of executing and delivering on large projects with high ambiguity.
• Detail-oriented approach to challenges and the ability to drive initiatives to completion.
• Exposure to high-growth start-ups.
• Knowledge of agile best practices and how to leverage them to release faster.
• Technical understanding of the software development process.
• Excellent written and oral business communication and people skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders, including technical leaders and executive management.
• Experience working cross-functionality across multiple teams to deliver high-quality products.
• Experience working in a remote-friendly environment.

Skills

• Deep experience working with APIs and back end technologies.
• Strong system-design skills and experience working with distributed systems.
• 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.
• Experience using a distributed messaging system.
• Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus.

What we offer

• Work from home budget
• Flexible monthly stipend
• 100% Health/Dental/Vision coverage and 85% dependent coverage
• Unlimited vacation policy (with 3 weeks minimum)
• Parental leave
• 401(k)
• Offsite company trips
• Offices in SF & NYC

This is a Hybrid role in San Francisco, CA.

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.