Staff Software Engineer, Risk Engineering

Flex is a growth-stage, NYC headquartered FinTech company that is creating the best rent payment experience. It’s hard to believe that it’s 2026 and paying rent on time is expensive, inflexible, and difficult. We’re here to change that! Flex enables our users to pay rent throughout the month on a schedule that better fits their finances and budget. Our mission is to empower as many renters as possible with flexibility over their most significant recurring expense. After deliberately keeping a stealth profile as we built up unprecedented investor support and an enthusiastic user base, we are looking for motivated individuals to help us keep our mission growing. Will you be a part of the team?

About the role

Flex is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Risk Engineering team. This role operates as a senior technical leader responsible for designing and evolving the core platforms that power risk decisioning, fraud prevention, and credit access across Flex products.

You will own systems that sit at the core of Flex’s risk strategy, including decision engines that evaluate customer behavior, credit exposure, and fraud signals in real time and at scale. These platforms are critical to enabling customer access while protecting Flex from misuse and loss.

This role requires deep experience in risk engineering, including credit and fraud decision systems, and the ability to translate complex business and risk strategies into scalable, auditable, and reliable technical systems. You will work closely with product, risk, data science, and engineering leaders to shape both near-term execution and long-term platform direction.

What you’ll do

• Lead the architecture and evolution of Flex’s risk decisioning platforms, supporting credit eligibility, fraud prevention, and controlled access across products.

• Own and operate high-scale, 24/7 APIs and distributed systems that power real-time risk decisions across Flex.

• Provide technical leadership and guidance on system architecture, long-term platform vision, and engineering best practices.

• Balance hands-on execution with architectural decision-making, ensuring delivery velocity alongside long-term maintainability.

• Partner closely with Risk, Product, and Data Science teams to translate business and risk strategy into scalable, auditable systems.

• Drive cross-team alignment on decision frameworks, data contracts, and experimentation standards.

• Identify systemic risk, reliability, or scalability gaps and proactively lead initiatives to address them.

• Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising engineering standards through design reviews, technical guidance, and example.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with ownership of complex, production-grade distributed systems.

• Strong background in risk engineering, including credit risk, fraud detection, or decision platform architecture.

• Experience operating as a technical lead, engineering manager, or tech lead manager, with demonstrated cross-team influence.

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Java, including deep knowledge of JVM performance, memory tuning, and GC.

• Proficiency with Spring (Core/Web/Boot), Gradle, and testing frameworks such as JUnit.

• Experience designing service-oriented architectures, REST APIs, message queues, and scalable systems.

• Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, Aurora RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticache) and containerized workloads.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with CI/CD systems (preferably GitHub Actions), Git, and engineering automation.

• Strong observability and reliability practices, including tools like DataDog.

• Experience with data platforms and analytics tooling such as Snowflake.

• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (e.g., CDK, Terraform).

• Proven ability to elevate engineering quality across teams through architecture, mentorship, and technical leadership.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience influencing non-engineering stakeholders.

The salary compensation range for this role will be commensurate with the candidate's experience and Flex's internal leveling guidelines and benchmarks.

• For working locations in NY/NJ/CA, the base salary pay range will be $221,000-$262,000

• For all other states, the base salary pay range will be $199,000-$236,000

#LI-Remote

Life at Flex:

We understand that it takes a diverse team of highly intelligent, curious, determined, empathetic, and self aware people to grow a successful company. Our HQ is located in New York City, but we have employees located throughout the US, Australia, Canada and South America. We are growing quickly, but deliberately, with a focus on building an inclusive culture. Our dynamic team has incredible perspectives to share, just as we know you do, and we take great pride in being an equal opportunity workplace.

We offer many employee benefits & perks. For full-time U.S based positions we offer:

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision available from Day 1

• Company equity

• 401(k) plan with company match (our company match kicks off at the beginning of 2026)

• Unlimited paid time off + 13 company paid holidays

• Parental leave

• Flex Cares Program

• Free Flex subscription

For full time non-US employees, we offer

• Competitive compensation + company equity

• Unlimited PTO