Staff Engineer, Backend Engineering

In this impactful, hands-on senior technical leadership role, you will drive the technical direction for our organization of over 20 engineers across 4 agile teams. You will provide technical guidance and mentorship, define and refine our architecture, processes, and best practices. Collaborating with domain experts and engineers, you will design, build, test, and own systems for servicing 401(k) plans. Reliability and performance are key, so you will extend our system’s robustness, scalability, observability, and maintainability.

About the team

The Recordkeeping team is responsible for bookkeeping of all the retirement plans served by Human Interest. The recordkeeping platform standardizes all transacting and trading on behalf of retirement plans and participants. All money movements utilize the recordkeeping platform, including contributions, roll-overs, distributions, loans, and more. The transactional, trade, and position data housed by the recordkeeping platform power robust reporting for all financial and trading activity, including descriptive data that tells the full story of the activity. This team is critical to the success of the business, being a foundational platform to record all the financial activities.

What you get to do every day

• Define forward-looking architectures through designs, establishing tradeoffs in cost vs. value, and gaining buy-in from key stakeholders.
• Drive the delivery of prototypes, technical standards, project plans, and roadmaps that align with the product vision.
• Coach and mentor senior engineers to improve innovation, efficiency, and technical capabilities.
• Deliver features and enhancements that improve complex processes and systems, making them more robust and higher performance with less human intervention.
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to share knowledge and build expertise.
• Raise the bar for team standards, resulting in cleaner, well-documented, and higher-quality code.
• Model and teach key behaviors for owning and delivering fast, horizontally scalable, and reliable systems.
• Advocate for forward-looking architectures and designs that minimize human intervention while keeping development costs incremental.

What you bring to the role

• Minimum 10 years of professional experience designing, building, and maintaining large-scale backend software products and systems.
• Expertise in designing and building modular distributed applications to support a rapidly growing customer base.
• Solid understanding of auto-scaling cloud technologies and efficient use of compute, storage, network, and virtualization technologies (preferably AWS).
• Ability to influence cross-team standards, practices, and tools by modeling behaviors and demonstrating outcomes.
• Clear articulation of the business benefits resulting from technical decisions.
• Enjoy mentoring other engineers and helping them grow technically, becoming a key go-to person in your company.
• Experience delivering large-scale backend systems, managing elastic workloads using queue/worker and streaming architectures.
• Experience migrating to modern scalable technologies from monolithic systems while maintaining high reliability and availability.
• Ability to quickly grasp the workings of accounting and 401k domains.
• Strong desire to learn, exchange feedback, and grow—from internal legacy and futuristic technical designs to retirement domains and workflows critical for our business.

Why you will love working at Human Interest

Mission – Highly collaborative startup dedicated to supporting employee engagement and growth. It’s an opportunity to help solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in America: saving for retirement.

Culture – Our operating principles define how we come together as a team to do our work. They reflect Human Interest’s unique view on what’s important and what’s right. Documenting this core aspect of our culture helps employees make good decisions on their own. It also helps candidates considering career opportunities critically evaluate whether they will thrive at Human Interest.

• Customer obsession
• Long-term orientation
• Autonomous and accountable teams
• An escalating bar for talent and performance
• Fundamental optimism