Senior Software Engineer, Core Pricing

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!

Upstart’s Core Pricing team drives key initiatives that directly influence Upstart’s revenue streams and product strategies. This includes developing the common systems used to calculate risk and profitability for each loan we originate, as well as providing a top-notch borrower experience by supporting our product development teams.

You will be joining a dynamic, cross-functional team that works closely with data scientists, product managers, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, high-impact solutions.

As a Senior Software Engineer on Core Pricing, you’ll play a critical role in evolving the systems that power Upstart’s loan pricing across multiple product lines. You’ll design and implement highly scalable, low-latency services that convert ML underwriting outputs into accurate risk and profitability measures, while helping define the future of Upstart’s pricing platform.

• Lead the design and development of scalable, high-performance services that enable real-time pricing decisions across multiple products.

• Collaborate with data scientists and product managers to translate business goals into robust technical solutions.

• Drive architectural improvements in the pricing platform to support rapid growth, new products, and evolving modeling needs.

• Mentor and coach engineers across the team, elevating best practices in system design, testing, and operational excellence.

• Ensure the quality and reliability of our pricing engines through comprehensive testing, code reviews, and production monitoring.

• Champion improvements in developer experience, automation, and observability to increase team velocity and platform resilience.

• 5+ years of professional software development experience building scalable public or consumer-facing products.

• High level of proficiency coding in production with Python, Kotlin, Go, or languages with similar syntax.

• Proven ability to independently own and deliver complex, multi-month engineering projects in fast-paced environments.

• Experience designing and building scalable APIs and microservices in a cloud-based environment (AWS or GCP).

• Strong problem-solving skills with an emphasis on scalability, performance, and system reliability.

• Excellent communication skills, able to explain complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Demonstrated experience mentoring and coaching engineers, influencing technical direction, and raising the bar for the team.

• Exhibits a bias for action and comfort navigating ambiguity while driving towards impactful outcomes.

• Background in finance / fintech, financial mathematics, statistics, or machine learning.

• History of thriving in diverse work environments: both collaborative and self-directed; remote and in-person.

• Deep experience with distributed systems, cloud-native development, and advanced CI/CD pipelines (infrastructure-as-code focus).

• Recognized as a subject matter expert or technical owner for a critical domain, with a passion for sharing knowledge and best practices.

• Active contributor to the tech community through open source, technical talks, or mentorship.

This role is available in the following locations:
Remote…