Senior Staff Software Engineer

About EarnIn

As one of the first pioneers of earned wage access, our passion at EarnIn is building products that deliver real-time financial flexibility for those with the unique needs of living paycheck to paycheck. Our community members access their earnings as they earn them, with options to spend, save, and grow their money without mandatory fees, interest rates, or credit checks.

We’re fortunate to have an incredibly experienced leadership team, combined with world-class funding partners like A16Z, Matrix Partners, DST, Ribbit Capital, and a very healthy core business with a tremendous runway. We’re growing fast and are excited to continue bringing world-class talent onboard to help shape the next chapter of our growth journey.

POSITION SUMMARY

We're looking for an exceptional Senior Staff Software Engineer to help define and evolve the Identity & Trust platform that enables secure, effortless access and trustworthy customer onboarding across EarnIn's expanding consumer and enterprise ecosystem. This role spans identity, authentication, authorization, identity verification, privacy, data protection, secure document processing, user/entity resolution, and fraud prevention. You'll architect foundational capabilities that are consumed across the company—from establishing that a customer is who they claim to be, to protecting their sensitive information, securely handling identity documents, and ensuring duplicate or abusive identities are detected and prevented.

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you'll operate at both a deep technical and organizational scale. You'll shape multi-year platform strategy, lead architecture across multiple teams, solve ambiguous and high-impact technical problems, and establish engineering patterns that allow teams across EarnIn to build trusted customer experiences safely and quickly. You'll also help define how AI and agentic engineering workflows can safely amplify engineering productivity, while establishing appropriate guardrails for security, privacy, correctness, and operational reliability. The base salary range for this full-time position is $279,000-$341,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. This hybrid position requires in-person work from our Mountain View HQ 2 days a week.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Set Platform Strategy & Architecture: Define the technical vision, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for Identity & Trust, establishing scalable patterns across authentication, authorization, KYC/identity verification, PII protection, secure document processing, deduplication, and related trust capabilities.
• Lead High-Impact Technical Initiatives: Drive complex, ambiguous initiatives spanning multiple services and teams—from problem definition and architecture through implementation, rollout, and long-term operation.
• Build Secure, Resilient Infrastructure: Design highly available distributed systems and APIs using microservices, event-driven architectures, and technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, DynamoDB, and MySQL, with strong emphasis on security, privacy, reliability, and regulatory requirements.
• Evolve Identity & Trust Capabilities: Architect solutions for OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, identity federation, KYC, PII tokenization, data vaulting, secure file ingest/scanning, and user/entity deduplication.
• Create Organizational Leverage: Establish reusable architecture patterns, technical standards, APIs, documentation, and platform primitives that enable product teams to safely consume Identity & Trust capabilities without reinventing foundational security and compliance solutions.
• Drive Operational Excellence: Set the bar for reliability, observability, SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production readiness across critical Trust infrastructure.
• Advance AI-Powered Engineering: Lead the responsible adoption of agentic workflows and multi-agent systems to automate engineering, testing, debugging, operations, and analysis, with appropriate evaluation, security, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.
• Multiply Engineering Talent: Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, influence technical direction across organizations, and raise the bar through architecture reviews, technical RFCs, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.
• Partner Across the Company: Work closely with Product, Security, Risk, Data Science, Design, Analytics, Infrastructure, Compliance, and executive stakeholders to translate customer, business, security, and regulatory needs into durable technical strategies.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated progression into Staff/Senior Staff-level technical leadership.
• Proven track record defining and executing technical strategy for large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and delivery across multiple engineering teams and organizational boundaries, without relying on direct authority.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and operating secure, highly available distributed backend systems at scale.
• Strong expertise across identity, trust, security, privacy, or regulated-data systems, ideally spanning both consumer and enterprise experiences.
• Deep understanding of authentication and authorization protocols and patterns, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, identity federation, and token management.
• Experience architecting one or more Trust domains such as KYC/identity verification, fraud or risk systems, PII tokenization, data vaults, encryption, secure document/file processing, identity resolution, or user deduplication.
• Production experience with identity platforms such as Okta, Auth0, Keycloak, or comparable internally developed identity infrastructure.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript, with the ability to work effectively across language boundaries.
• Deep experience with REST APIs, SQL/NoSQL data stores, Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms, Kubernetes, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong operational instincts, including experience with SLOs, observability, incident response, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production reliability for critical systems.
• Hands-on experience building AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including orchestration, tool use, evaluation, security boundaries, and guardrails.
• Exceptional architectural judgment and the ability to simplify complex systems while balancing security, privacy, reliability, scalability, developer experience, regulatory requirements, and speed of execution.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior technical talent and create leverage across an engineering organization.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, or similar tools) as part of your software development workflow.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical strategies to engineering, product, security, risk, and executive audiences.
• Experience in FinTech, regulated industries, identity, fraud, privacy, security, or compliance-sensitive environments is strongly preferred.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Success in this role is measured by the technical leverage and trust infrastructure you create across EarnIn, not simply by the services you personally build. You will help establish a cohesive Identity & Trust platform that makes it easier for every product team to build secure customer experiences. You'll create durable architectural foundations for who a customer is, whether they can be trusted, what they can access, and how their most sensitive information is protected.

You'll anticipate scale, security, regulatory, and product challenges before they become organizational constraints; simplify fragmented capabilities into reusable platform primitives; and enable engineering teams to move faster without compromising trust or safety. You'll operate comfortably from deep technical implementation to company-level strategy—diving into code and production systems when necessary, leading architecture across teams, mentoring senior technical leaders, and establishing technical direction for some of EarnIn's most critical foundational capabilities.

At EarnIn, we believe that the best way to build a financial system that works for everyday people is by hiring a team that represents our diverse community. Our team is diverse not only in background and experience but also in perspective. We celebrate our diversity and strive to create a culture of belonging. EarnIn does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, legally protected medical condition, family care status, military or veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws. EarnIn is an E-Verify participant.

EarnIn does not accept unsolicited resumes from individual recruiters or third-party recruiting agencies in response to job postings. No fee will be paid to third parties who submit unsolicited candidates directly to our hiring managers or HR team.