Payments / Infrastructure Engineer

Payments / Infrastructure Engineer

Location: San Francisco, California, USA

Working model: Fully in-person, 9 AM–5 PM

Salary: $150,000–$210,000 base + 0.8–0.9% equity

Experience: 2+ years (typically 2–5 years; systems depth and problem-solving matter more than tenure)

Visa sponsorship: Available

About the company

Join a fast-growing, seed-stage fintech building the card and payment infrastructure behind US education funding programs. The platform gives parents instant access to education funds while helping states automate fraud detection and improve the way public funding is distributed.

The company is already live and growing rapidly, with transaction volumes and adoption expanding as it prepares to support additional states and federal programs.

This is an opportunity to join early, work alongside former founders and experienced fintech risk professionals, and help build the infrastructure behind a platform with real-world impact.

The role

As a Payments / Infrastructure Engineer, you will take ownership of the systems responsible for moving money reliably and securely. You will work across the entire infrastructure stack, from card issuing and ledger integrity to reconciliation, deployment pipelines and monitoring.

The platform is scaling from hundreds to potentially hundreds of thousands of cardholders, creating challenging problems around throughput, reliability, security and system design. You don't need previous fintech or payments experience to succeed. The team values strong engineering fundamentals, hands-on ownership and the ability to reason from first principles over familiarity with a particular industry or technology stack.

What you'll do

• Design, build and operate high-throughput distributed systems that support reliable payment flows.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure for card issuing, ledger integrity and financial reconciliation.
• Improve system reliability, observability, monitoring and incident response.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment infrastructure.
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges and security risks.
• Make pragmatic engineering decisions as the platform scales rapidly.
• Take ownership of technical challenges from initial design through implementation and production operation.
• Evaluate trade-offs independently, using first-principles reasoning rather than simply replicating solutions from previous environments.

What we're looking for

• At least 2 years of relevant hands-on software or infrastructure engineering experience. Strong technical depth matters more than years of experience.
• Demonstrable experience building or leading distributed systems, high-throughput infrastructure or low-latency systems.
• A solid understanding of system design, reliability and performance at scale.
• Some exposure to security engineering and building secure, resilient systems.
• A track record of personally owning technical systems in production, ideally with measurable results relating to volume, latency, uptime or reliability.
• Experience working in a fast-growing environment where systems and processes need to evolve quickly.
• Strong independent problem-solving skills and the ability to explain technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Willingness to work from the San Francisco office five days a week.

Experience in payments, card issuing, ledgers or reconciliation is a plus, but not a requirement. Relevant experience in quantitative trading, cloud infrastructure, security engineering or large-scale consumer technology is equally valuable.

Why join?

• Meaningful impact: Build infrastructure that helps families access education funding while supporting fraud prevention.
• End-to-end ownership: Work across the full money-movement stack rather than owning a small component of a larger system.
• Significant technical challenges: Solve real-world problems involving throughput, reliability, security and rapid scaling.
• Early-stage influence: Help shape the architecture and engineering practices of a growing fintech.
• Competitive compensation: Earn $150,000–$210,000 in base salary, plus 0.8–0.9% equity.
• Visa sponsorship: Sponsorship is available for eligible candidates.

Interview process

1. Founder introduction: Discuss your motivation, experience and approach to problem-solving.
2. Technical deep dive: Explore your engineering experience, system design decisions and technical depth.
3. Take-home assignment and whiteboard presentation: Demonstrate your ability to solve problems and communicate your reasoning.
4. Paid on-site work trial: Work on three to five real projects with the team.
5. Offer: Successful candidates receive an offer to join the company.

Interested?

If you're an engineer who enjoys building reliable, high-performance systems and wants to take ownership of infrastructure that is scaling rapidly, we'd like to hear from you.

Apply with your CV and be ready to discuss a distributed system you've personally built or led, the scale it operated at, and the engineering decisions you made along the way.