Founding Engineer - GovTech

About the role

We are looking for a Founding Engineer to build the core financial infrastructure for a new public‑sector fintech category. You will join an in‑person team in San Francisco and work directly with the co‑founders to design systems that move billions of dollars of state‑administered education funds.

Key responsibilities

• Design and own a multi‑service monorepo that includes an event‑driven pipeline, payments API, balance health‑checks, and regulatory reporting jobs.
• Make architecture‑level decisions for secure, reliable handling of large‑scale education payments, including card issuing, processor integrations, and fraud/credit risk controls.
• Implement money‑movement flows: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic processing.
• Collaborate with domain experts from state agencies, risk, and payments backgrounds to ensure compliance and operational excellence.

Required profile

• Proven experience building payment or financial infrastructure from the ground up.
• Strong understanding of regulatory reporting, risk management, and large‑scale transaction processing.
• Ability to work autonomously in a fast‑moving startup environment and make critical architectural decisions.

Required skills

• Payment systems architecture
• Event‑driven microservices
• API design and implementation
• Card issuing and processor integration
• Fraud detection and credit risk controls

What we offer

• Opportunity to shape a brand‑new fintech category that impacts millions of families.
• Close collaboration with founders who have deep technical and industry expertise.
• Competitive compensation and equity in a well‑funded, high‑growth startup.