Staff Backend Engineer

About Us

GiveCard builds infrastructure to magically move money to people who need it. Last year, 1 in every 300 households in the United States received financial assistance through GiveCard — including families who lost their homes in disasters, state benefit recipients, and survivors of domestic violence.

We’re a deeply caring, small team of Givetopians who believe that the smartest people in the world should dedicate their time to manufacturing good magic. Our culture and philosophy put morality, vocation, and fulfillment at the forefront — and we have a very, very fun time doing it.

The Role

We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to take deep ownership of the most critical financial systems at GiveCard. This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who loves writing hard backend code, designing durable systems that move real money, and building infrastructure that must be correct, auditable, and resilient at scale.

You’ll work deeply in our ledgering, payments, and workflow orchestration systems, shaping how money moves through GiveCard from end to end. While this role does not involve formal people management, you’ll act as a de facto technical lead for the backend team — setting technical direction, mentoring other engineers, and owning foundational systems that the rest of the company depends on.

This is a high-autonomy role in a fast-moving, mission-driven environment, with real responsibility and real impact on millions of lives.

This role is Remote, but you're welcome to work from our offices in New York and San Francisco whenever convenient.

How You’ll Impact the Company

• Own and evolve GiveCard’s most critical backend systems, including our core ledgering, payment orchestration, and task execution infrastructure. These systems must be correct, auditable, and safe in the face of partial failure — and you’ll help define how we build and scale them.

• Lead our highest-complexity technical work. When the company needs to ship something foundational — a new financial workflow, a high-stakes integration, or a major refactor of core infrastructure — you’ll be someone we rely on to design it well and see it through.

• Raise the technical bar across the backend team by setting best practices for system design, code quality, documentation, and engineering judgment. You’ll be a role model for how we build and ship high-quality software.

• Act as a strategic technical partner in shaping GiveCard’s architecture and product direction. Whether it’s a 0-to-1 initiative or a long-term infrastructure investment, you’ll have a strong voice in deciding what we build — and you’ll be hands-on in making it real.

• Mentor and up-level other engineers through thoughtful feedback, design reviews, and collaborative problem-solving.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience architecting, building, shipping, and maintaining backend software at scale

• Experience acting as a technical leader or Staff-level individual contributor, including mentoring engineers, leading technical design discussions, and owning large systems end-to-end

• Strong backend engineering experience in one or more production languages (Go, Java, Ruby, etc), with a willingness to work primarily in Go

• Experience designing and operating complex systems, with strong comfort working with Postgres and relational data models

• Ability to ramp up quickly in a new product ecosystem and contribute meaningfully to large, high-impact projects

• Experience working in startup or high-autonomy environments, and comfort operating effectively amid ambiguity

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences

• Ability to give and receive high-quality feedback in technical specs, code reviews, and team discussions

• A strong desire to use your work to make a positive impact in the world

Exceptional Candidates Will Have

• Experience building financial systems, payment infrastructure, core ledgers, or banking platforms

• Comfort designing systems that require correctness, idempotency, reconciliation, and auditability

• Experience operating backend systems under high load and real-world failure conditions

• Comfort making infrastructure and DevOps decisions using AWS, Terraform, and modern cloud tooling

• Excellent judgment when trading off speed, robustness, and long-term scalability

• The ability to communicate and collaborate effectively across a wide range of seniority levels

• A strong sense of ownership and an impact-driven mindset

• Passion for mentoring and helping other engineers grow

• Curiosity and excitement when working with new technologies or tackling novel, difficult problems

At GiveCard, You’ll Enjoy

• Working alongside very smart people on technology that genuinely matters.

• A remote-friendly work environment with a dog-friendly office in Manhattan

• A minimum of 25 days of PTO

• 100% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your family

• Generous parental leave

• Expected compensation of $210,000 – $240,000, based on level and experience.