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Backend Software Engineer (Senior/Staff)

Cardless· Engineering
Apply on company site
San Francisco$160k - $295kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Senior/Staff backend engineer role at Cardless building infrastructure for modern credit cards, focusing on ownership of large, multi-domain systems for payments, underwriting, ledgers, APIs, and regulatory-compliant workflows.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build backend systems that move real money, make credit decisions, and serve hundreds of thousands of cardholders
  • Take projects from ambiguity to production: scoping, design, implementation, testing, rollout, and the operational life that follows
  • Work across domains rather than inside a single service, going where the highest-value problem is
  • Partner with product, risk, compliance, operations, and our partner and vendor counterparts to ship things that hold up in a regulated environment
  • Improve reliability, observability, and developer experience as you go, and leave each system better than you found it

Qualifications

  • Strong systems thinking and problem solving. You can reason about an unfamiliar system, find where it breaks, and make a sound call with incomplete information
  • Experience building and operating production backend services, with a track record of shipping projects end to end
  • Solid fundamentals in distributed systems, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
  • Proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem. We are primarily Java with Python for data work, and we do not expect you to have used ours
  • Clear communication and genuine care about correctness. A bug here means someone's card declines at the grocery store or their credit report is wrong

Skills

Required:Systems thinkingProduction backend servicesDistributed systems, APIs, databases, infrastructureJava (primary) / Python (data tasks)Communication and correctness

Benefits

  • Meaningful Start-up equity
  • 100% health, vision & dental primary coverage
  • 75% health, vision & dental dependent coverage
  • Catered lunches
  • $250/month Commuter benefit
  • Parental leave
  • Team building events & happy hours
  • Flexible PTO with a minimum of 15 days off per year
  • Apple equipment
  • 401k plan
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Cardless

Build credit into your product experience.

Build credit into your product experience. Run it end to end with modular APIs, pre-built components, analytics, and full-service infrastructure.

Credit card platformAPIEmbedded finance
Company profileWebsite

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