Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Who we are

About Backpack

Backpack is a payments infrastructure company building the first payments operating system for universities, streamlining the flow of external payments for complex payment types representing ~$100BN in annual volume. As education becomes more expensive, students and their families are increasingly looking to a broader array of funding sources, including 529 college savings plans, outside/private scholarships, third-party sponsors, and family contributions - we are bringing these online by building the first payments system for these payment types.

Higher education is one of the most expensive and operationally complex sectors in the U.S., with payment processes that are often decades behind other industries. Paper checks, manual reconciliation, and fragmented systems create unnecessary friction for students, families, universities, and external funding sources like scholarships and corporate sponsors. Backpack’s mission is to build modern payments infrastructure that reduces administrative friction and ultimately helps lower the cost of education.

About the team

Our goal is to make external payments into universities shockingly simple and worry-free for students, families, universities, and funding organizations alike. Behind the scenes, this requires building sophisticated payment operations systems that handle complex money movement, automated reconciliation, and real-time visibility — all tailored to the specific needs of university bursars, financial aid teams, and external funders.

Our founding team has been brought together to ensure we have the best blend of experience to achieve this; from deep payments and technical expertise, to go-to-market and operations. We are a group of past operators and executives that have worked at technology companies like Uber and Google, FinTech companies like SoFi and Atlas, EdTech companies like Blackbaud and traditional financial services companies like UBS, KPMG and Accenture.

Our Progress

Despite being a small, early-stage company, we are already working with some of the largest universities in the US (and the world), facilitating millions in transaction volume on their behalf. Our partners include universities such as The University of Alabama, Miami University, Lipscomb University and St. Edward’s University - and we process payments on behalf of large public and private institutions such as the Texas Workforce Commission, The Davis Scholarship Foundation and a variety of state Vocational Rehab divisions.

The Role

We are looking for a highly experienced Senior/Staff software engineer who is both a hands on programmer and has a proven track record as technical leader who can architect scalable and robust backend systems.

You’ll write extensive code, drive the technical architecture and scalability of our platforms, and collaborate with stakeholders to build a generational education payment systems. You’ll set the pace, ensuring both high-quality execution and fast iteration, acting as a multiplier to help the entire team deliver impact.

What the job involves:

• Working closely with our founders, engineers, and operations to make critical technical decisions to enhance performance, security, and scalability for our products and business.
• Shaping the future of our core payments infrastructure by partnering with leadership to drive technical initiatives as the voice in the room for architectural decisions.
• Taking full ownership of our infrastructure stack - lead initiatives for our infrastructure stack and make decisions that balance short-term execution with medium and long-term scalability.
• Setting the strategic direction for engineering quality - develop and embed a culture of robust, automated testing that ensures quality for our customers, and enables us to stay lean.
• Building new and maintain existing backend services with a focus on performance, reliability and scalability.
• Mentoring and providing technical guidance to engineering team members, promoting best practices in coding, testing, and architecture.

What We’re Looking For

You’ll do well in this role if, you are someone with:

1. Low-ego and humility, our most valued characteristic and key to our teams success to date.
2. A growth mindset, and a healthy comfort with ambiguity
3. An ability to work with an element of playfulness that unlocks creativity, and also ensure the reliability, security and compliance standards our customers deserve.
4. A great attitude who is always looking for ways to be involved and improve our products.
5. Passion for helping and teaching your colleagues, customers and partners.
6. Intrinsic motivation that loves the idea of building core infrastructure that will make education more accessible and affordable for decades to come.

Your experience

We recognize not everyone will meet all of the criteria. If you meet most of the criteria below and you’re excited about the opportunity and willing to learn, we’d love to hear from you.

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong background in backend development, product engineering, and cloud infrastructure.
• Minimum 3 years of experience at a senior level.
• 3+ years of experience building APIs and architecting/building backend systems at scale.
• Demonstrated success of owning/managing large-scale backend infrastructure and cloud infrastructure management (AWS, Terraform, messaging queues, etc), and CI/CD.
• Experience managing and organizing multiple ongoing projects at once.
• Experience in a technical leadership role leading software projects involving multiple engineers.
• Expertise in JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js and/or Ruby on rails.
• Extensive experience with REST APIs. Experience with GraphQL, WebSocket, etc is nice to have.
• Advanced knowledge of Postgres and/or other relational databases. Experience with other database systems is a plus.
• Experience with modern testing frameworks and practices including API testing.
• Knowledge of security best practices in financial services.
• Strong organizational and prioritization skills.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a remote team via tools like Slack, Notion, and Linear.

Nice to Have’s:

• Experience with authentication and authorization technologies (OAuth, JWT, etc) or techniques such SAML, SSO, etc.
• Knowledge of algorithms and protocols for securing data, including TLS/SSL, digital signatures, hashing, and encryption.
• Experience in monitoring and observability and running a production application at scale.
• Have experience building applications from scratch.
• Domain knowledge in payment processing, identify/auth, or finance.
• Experience working in Fintech, the financial services industry, or at early/pre-seed start up.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary

The salary range for this role is $175,000 - $250,000

Equity

The equity ownership range for this role is 0.4% - 1.0%

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision health care plans
• Health care FSA/HSA plans
• 401K
• Commuter benefits
• PTO & 10+ Public Holidays
• Backpack Recharges - dedicated team time off to recharge

Location

New York City, NY or Austin, TX. In-office 3 days (hybrid).

Interview Process

We value and prioritize transparency here at Backpack. Here is what you can expect:

1. Initial interview with hiring manager - 30-45 mins
2. Coding Assessment - 60 mins
3. Second interview with one of our co-founders (CEO/COO) - 30-45 mins
4. ‘Virtual’ (or in-person) onsite, including:
   1. Technical interviews
   2. Meeting the rest of the Backpack team
5. Reference calls (we’ll ask for 2 references with at least one being a direct manager)

Accommodations

We are committed to providing an accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations during any point in the interview process, please let us know and we’ll work with you to better accommodate your needs.

We look forward to hearing from you!

We cannot wait to hear from passionate, driven and talented people that are excited about our mission. We are building a first of its kind fintech company to completely revolutionize an entire asset class and, eventually, how all Americans pay for their education. We acknowledge that this is a big ask list so even if there are a couple of missing pieces, we strongly urge you to still apply.