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About the Role
As Founding Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company's stack, from card issuing to disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting. You will make architecture calls yourself rather than inherit someone else's system. This is a founding seat working directly alongside the co-founders.
Responsibilities
- Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up.
- Make architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.
- Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay.
- Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.
- Build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales from hundreds to thousands of users.
- Keep independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing.
- Build automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear.
Requirements
- You'd rather design the first version of a system than optimize someone else's.
- You're comfortable making the call when there's no precedent to point to.
- You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis.
- You build systems that stay predictable even when external systems fail.
- You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving.
- You want to have engineered the system, not just contributed to it.
- Able to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA.
- Visa support is available.
Skills
- Payment Systems Architecture
- Event-driven pipeline design
- Payments API development
- Card issuing infrastructure
- Processor integrations
- Fraud and credit risk controls
- Money movement flow design
- Ledger integrity
- Transaction lifecycle management
- Idempotency
- Retries
- Deterministic replay
- Reconciliation
- Operational risk mitigation
- Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing, or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus
Location
- San Francisco, CA
Work Type
- In-Office
- Full-time
Experience Level
- Founding Engineer
Salary/Compensations
- $125,000 – $175,000 per year
Benefits
- Generous Founding Equity
- Relocation Support
- Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship
About the Company
- EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup.
- The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (ESAs or School Choice Funds).
- The $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year.
- Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience.
- The company treats this as their life's work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.
- The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together.
- The founders have experience as a Quant at Goldman Sachs and built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally.
- The core team includes talent from MILA, SpaceX, Mercury, Stripe, Circle, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Director at Arizona's ESA department.