Staff Engineer, Backend Developer

Staff Engineer, Thera (NYC, in-person)

Thera is building the financial OS for modern SMBs. Payroll, payments, treasury, spend, accounting, and docs in one system that actually works end-to-end.

We're looking for a hands‑on Staff Engineer to own the technical foundation in our highest‑leverage areas and help us scale from “great product” to category‑defining company.

This is not a sit‑back‑and‑manage role. You'll be in the code, in the architecture, and in the room making high‑stakes decisions daily.

NYC, 5 days/week

• a product customers use
• real workflows running through it
• increasing complexity across payments, accounting, and ops

• Architecture and technical direction across payroll, payments, and new products
• Engineering execution on the hardest problems in the stack
• Helping hire and tech‑lead a small, high‑quality team (starting ~5 engineers)
• Decisions on security, reliability, scalability, and compliance in your areas
• Tight partnership with product and ops to translate real workflows into systems
• Roadmaps, prioritization, and actually shipping

• Systems powering payroll and money movement
• Products across Spend, Docs, Cash, and Accounting
• Internal tooling that reduces manual work and errors
• Infrastructure that increases velocity without breaking things

• Get deep on the system, data flows, and constraints
• Identify the biggest risks (payments, data integrity, scaling)
• Ship a meaningful improvement on the spend product

• Start addressing the highest‑leverage technical gaps
• Map out future builds across the roadmap
• Begin influencing how we hire and level engineers

• Set technical direction in your areas
• Improve engineering velocity and reliability
• Help build out our engineering in‑person culture

• You’ve built and scaled real systems
• You’re still hands‑on and like being close to the code
• Strong systems thinker
• You move fast and take ownership
• Comfortable operating in a regulated environment
• You’ve mentored or tech‑led engineers before

Stack today:
Type Script + Java/Kotlin (flexible)

• You want a pure management role
• You avoid ambiguity or messy real‑world systems
• You're not willing to be in‑person in NYC

• You shape the technical foundation in your areas
• You work directly with founders
• Your decisions immediately impact the company’s trajectory

Backed by YC, 10X Founders, Zillionize, and Amino Capital.