Forward Deployed Engineer - Public Benefit Payments

About the role

EQL Tech represents a well-funded startup that builds the financial rails for state education funds (School Choice Funds), helping families access roughly $7.5k per child per year. The company is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to act as the technical bridge between state agencies and banking partners and the software that runs it. The role is based in San Francisco, California, in an in-person office, with visa sponsorship available.

Key responsibilities

• Own the regulatory and banking-partner reporting surface: build the daily loan-tape and originations pipeline, audit trails and reporting used by state regulators and banking auditors.
• Build daily/continuous reconciliation between the internal ledger, card network events, banking events and vendor reports, with tools to investigate mismatches quickly.
• Design a money movement flow with ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries and deterministic replay.
• Minimise operational risk by adding guardrails against double-spending, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances and orphaned settlements.
• Own and evolve a multi-service monorepo covering an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance health checks and regulatory reporting jobs.

Required profile

• Able to turn a half-formed requirement from a state agency or banking partner into a concrete system design.
• Strong focus on correctness, with idempotency and validation in place.
• Built systems that stay predictable despite unreliable banks, queues and changing requirements.
• Willing to work in person in San Francisco, CA (visa support available).

Required skills

• Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus.

What we offer

• Salary of $125,000 to $175,000 per year, commensurate with experience.
• Founding equity.
• Relocation support for candidates willing to move to San Francisco or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to customers.
• Visa sponsorship for those without a visa.