Staff Engineer

Job Description:

• Set technical direction for money movement, AI-driven decisions, and the underlying platform
• Design the evolution of the ledger, decisioning, and platform systems
• Raise engineering standards through code review and pairing
• Determine what processors, contractors, and program administrators need
• Build, monitor, and improve products end to end in production
• Help decide when to use an AI model, a rule, or a human for document verification, eligibility checks, and fraud detection
• Define how AI-driven decisions are measured
• Own the ledger, lender loan tape, and reconciliation against bank records
• Ensure financial records are correct to the cent and audit-ready
• Consolidate outgrown systems such as Airtable into agentic in-house tools for operations and program configuration
• Improve CI speed, test-suite health, backups, database migrations, alerts, and workflows
• Investigate production incidents, identify root causes, fix issues, and document outcomes
• Help shape engineering team growth and hiring

Requirements:

• 8+ years building production software
• Experience as the person responsible for a system when it breaks
• Staff-level scope or equivalent impact
• Experience leading the design of a system other engineers build on and remaining accountable for it in production
• Deep TypeScript experience on the backend, including Bun, Node, Next.js, tRPC, Prisma or similar
• Solid relational database skills in MySQL or Postgres, including schema design, query plans, and migrations
• Track record of taking on work outside the assigned lane and finishing it
• Strong debugging from first principles and ability to reason from browser to database and back
• Strong git knowledge, including rebase
• Ability to use AI agents heavily while remaining the author and accountable for every line
• Ability to defend PR code and explain how it was tested
• Comfort and competence in compliance- and security-heavy environments
• Ability to learn rebate programs, underwriting, and contractor payments
• Nice to have: Temporal or another workflow engine
• Nice to have: Payments, ledgers, lending, or reconciliation experience
• Nice to have: dbt, Snowflake, or other analytics tooling
• Nice to have: Evaluating LLM output with test sets and metrics
• Nice to have: Infrastructure experience with Pulumi, Docker, Vercel, Tailscale, Datadog, or Sentry
• Nice to have: Energy programs or utility software experience
• Stack experience: TypeScript, Turborepo, pnpm, tsx, Bun, Next.js, React, tRPC, Prisma, MySQL, Postgres, Temporal, Python, Snowflake, dbt, Lightdash, Vercel, DigitalOcean, Pulumi, Datadog, Sentry, Claude Code, and internal agent tooling

Benefits:

• Meaningful equity package
• Generous medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible, unlimited time off, with a minimum of three weeks encouraged
• At least two company gatherings each year
• Budget to co-work when solving difficult problems together
• Welcoming, family- and parent-friendly environment
• No-negotiation compensation policy with Eli's strongest offer