Founding Engineer - GovTech

About the role

EQL Tech has been retained by a high-growth, well-funded startup to appoint a Founding Engineer who will build, from near zero, the infrastructure behind a new category of public-sector fintech. The company raises $900B in US public education funds and wants to give families access to them through a consumer card product. The role is a founding seat working directly with the co-founders, in an in-person team in San Francisco.

Key responsibilities

• Design and own a multi-service monorepo covering an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance health checks and regulatory reporting jobs
• Make architecture decisions on handling billions of dollars in state-funded payments, including card issuing, processor integrations and fraud and credit risk controls
• Design a money movement flow with ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries and deterministic replay
• Build daily/continuous reconciliation between the internal ledger, card network events, banking events and vendor reports, with tools to investigate mismatches quickly
• Build guardrails against bad states such as double-spending, duplicate webhooks, inconsistent balances and orphaned settlements
• Keep independent ledgers aligned and build automated health checks and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies early

Required profile

• Comfortable designing the first version of a system and making calls with no precedent
• Obsessed about correctness, with idempotency and validation in the database
• Built systems that stay predictable even when banks, queues and vendors are unreliable
• Willing to work in person in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)
• Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus

What we offer

• Salary of USD 125,000 to 175,000 per year, commensurate with experience
• Founding equity
• Relocation support for San Francisco or Phoenix, and travel to visit customers
• Visa sponsorship if needed