Senior Software Engineer

About Upstart

Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital‑first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.

Upstart is a digital‑first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California;
Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

As a member of our Servicing Engineering team, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring smooth loan management, optimizing collections, and cultivating strong customer relationships — with a specialized focus on Payments. Our team’s mission is to build a best-in-class loan servicing and payments platform that enables flexibility, operational excellence, and innovation in how borrowers make and manage payments.

We’re developing a cutting‑edge platform that introduces business process automation, payment workflow orchestration, and a seamless user experience for both borrowers and internal stakeholders.

Our Senior Software Engineers are trusted technical leaders who thrive across the full stack. You don’t wait for someone to pave the road—you build it. You bring deep technical expertise in payments systems, from NACHA nuances to payment rails architecture, and a strong understanding of the operational and technical challenges of scaling financial workflows.

You’ll be a hands‑on Team lead, shaping the direction of payment features, integrations, and standards that define how we transact with borrowers. You’ll collaborate closely with Product, Analytics, and Operations to ensure that our payments platform is reliable, extensible, and ready to support new financial experiences.

• Lead successful cross‑team or multi‑quarter projects that expand the capabilities and reliability of our payments and servicing systems.
• Design and build full‑stack features, including new payment workflows, card payment expansion, and flexible payment timing options that empower borrowers.
• Own the architecture for payment abstractions – ensuring idempotency, exactly‑once semantics, and extensible contracts that safely integrate with other systems.
• Set engineering standards for correctness, observability, and operational excellence in payment processing.
• Collaborate with internal and external partners to evolve Upstart’s payment platform and maintain compliance with payment network rules and NACHA standards.
• Mentor engineers across the team, sharing expertise on distributed systems, financial domain design, and scalable architecture.
• Help grow the engineering team and foster a culture of technical rigor, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Minimum Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software development experience.
• Proven technical leadership experience in designing and operating distributed, microservices-based systems.
• Deep understanding of release orchestration, deployment, logging, monitoring, and alerting at scale.
• Demonstrated ownership of production‑critical payment or financial transaction systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing and maintaining payments or transaction‑oriented systems with strong reliability guarantees.
• Knowledge of ACH, NACHA, or card payment networks and related operational concerns.
• Experience writing clean, extensible APIs that abstract payment workflows and enable integration across platforms.
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails or Kotlin in a microservices environment.
• Strong communication and mentoring skills, with the ability to influence cross‑functionally.
• Growth mindset with a commitment to excellence and iterative improvement.

Positio…