Staff Engineer, User Trust

About Betterment

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease.  We're headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays).

About the Role:

On User Trust, you'll build the systems and experiences that help users, partners, and regulators trust Betterment's platform. You'll work on critical capabilities spanning, user privacy and compliance, account access, KYC, risk scoring, login and account recovery, and fraud prevention.

This role sits at the intersection of security, legal & compliance, risk, and product engineering to deliver scalable, reliable solutions that protect customers, reduce fraud, and support Betterment's regulatory obligations.

As a staff engineer, you'll play an instrumental role in designing and implementing complex systems within the team's domain, guiding your team's full stack development practices and collaborating with other senior engineering leaders to advance Betterment's technology and create high performance, reliability and exceptional developer experience.

If you're passionate about delightful customer experiences, building scalable, high-performance web applications and are eager to work in a collaborative, forward-thinking environment, we'd love to have you on our team.

New York City: $200,000 - $238,000

We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, life and AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance, EAP, commuter and parking benefits FSA/HSA, and 401(k) with employer match as well as a flexible PTO policy. This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.  For jobs based out of our NYC HQ, we require in office attendance Monday through Thursday, weekly.

What We're Looking For:

* Experience designing, building, and operating systems for fraud detection, prevention, or risk mitigation in high-trust environments.

* Familiarity with building customer-facing and internal tools that require strong reliability, auditability, and thoughtful handling of risk.

* Exposure to domains involving identity, access, privacy, compliance, financial workflows, or other trust-critical user experiences.

* Track record of balancing user experience, business goals, and control frameworks when building scalable fullstack systems.

* Have proven and recent experience scoping, building, and leading technical projects (and the teams building them) from discovery through release

* Have experience in at least one server-side language - Ruby, Java, C#, C++, Python. (we use Ruby on Rails)

* Have experience building interactive web applications using modern Java script frameworks (we use React)

* Have a strong understanding of appropriate technical design, architecture, and other complexity in building web applications

* Have experience gathering inputs, building consensus, and making technical decisions in an inclusive manner

* Have experience communicating effectively with technical and non-technical colleagues across different roles, teams, and lines of business

* Have a commitment to upskilling teammates through feedback, pairing, and mentorship

* Have a passion for software engineering, and for creating what doesn't exist

* Know how to make the tradeoffs required to ship without compromising quality

* Realize that automated tests are a worthwhile investment

* Appreciate agility and pragmatism in software development

* Thrive in a startup environment

What being at Betterment means for you

We change lives

Join a community of innovators working to transform financial outcomes for real people. Your work will make an impact, always laddering up to our mission: making people's lives better.

We set audacious goals

We set them for the company, our customers, and ourselves-and we won't stop until we reach them. We…