Staff Engineer, Software Engineer

America is investing trillions of dollars to make homes and buildings more efficient, electric, and resilient. But the programs paying for these upgrades still run on paperwork, manual review, and disconnected systems. Contractors can wait months to receive money they have already earned. Program administrators struggle to process projects quickly and accurately. Too much funding is lost to administrative friction before it reaches the buildings it was intended to improve.

Eli is building a better system.

Our platform helps utilities, government agencies, and their partners run energy programs, from determining whether a project qualifies to reviewing documentation, reporting results, and issuing payments. We also advance money to contractors before the underlying rebates are paid, giving them the cash flow to keep taking on new work.

Since launching in December 2023, Eli has processed hundreds of thousands of projects and advanced nearly $50 million to contractors. We are now preparing to support a much larger volume of projects and capital.

We're hiring a Staff Engineer. Under the hood, Eli takes in applications from contractors and homeowners, verifies eligibility and documents, decides who gets paid, pays contractors early through a credit facility, tracks every dollar through a ledger, and reconciles it against the bank. A lot of what we build moves real money and gets audited.

You’ll work directly with our two cofounders:
Adrian, who heads product, and Eduardo, who heads engineering. We're a team of 7 engineers, including Adrian and Eduardo, both of whom commit to production daily. Each engineer owns a large part of the system, and your work shows up in production and in front of customers within days.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll set technical direction for the systems where correctness matters most: money movement, AI-driven decisions, and the platform underneath them. You'll still write and ship code every week. Here, seniority means more responsibility for outcomes, not more distance from the work.

This role is based in New York, and we work together in person there. For the right engineer, we can accommodate fully remote within the US. Because of compliance requirements, this role is open to US residents only.

Almost all of the code we ship is written by AI agents. We run Claude Code across parallel worktrees, and our own bots handle PR review and first-pass production investigations. Our hand-crafted harness and internal tooling make this possible. We review everything carefully, and the engineer whose name is on the PR is responsible for every line in it.

Good judgment is the scarce resource. An agent will write the pagination code. It won't notice that the query loads 1,000 rows to render 50, question whether the feature should exist, or explain to a program manager why a claim was denied. That part is the job.

Nobody here will groom a ticket for you and wait. We want someone who looks around, sees the work nobody is doing, and takes it. Some of what's on the table today:

• Technical direction. Decide how the ledger, decisioning, and platform evolve, write the designs other engineers build on, and raise the bar through code review and pairing.

• Product, end to end. You’ll figure out what processors, contractors, and program administrators need, build it, watch it work or fail in production, and adjust.

• AI decisions that move money. Document verification, eligibility checks, and fraud detection, where a wrong answer means someone gets paid who shouldn't, or doesn't get paid when they should. You'll help decide when to use a model, a rule, or a human, and how to measure whether it's working.

• Money movement. The ledger, the loan tape we…