Engineering Lead, Software Engineer
Listed on 2026-01-08
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Software Development
Software Engineer
Who is Recruiting from Scratch:
Recruiting from Scratch is a talent firm that focuses on placing the best candidate for our clients. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across North America, South America, and Europe to help them hire.
Title of Role: Engineering Lead – Payments
Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Growth-Stage Startup (Series B)
Office Type: Onsite, 5 Days a Week
Salary: $250k – $400k base + significant equity (Total Compensation up to $5M)
Company Description Our client is a fast-growing, venture-backed startup transforming the digital economy by empowering over a million online entrepreneurs. With a robust platform handling over $115 million in monthly earnings, the company is scaling its engineering leadership to drive innovation in payments, fraud detection, and financial infrastructure. This is an opportunity to join a high-performing team at the forefront of enabling secure, efficient digital commerce.
You’ll be one of the foundational engineers in their brand-new San Francisco office, with the autonomy to shape technical direction and build a world-class team around you. Backed by top investors and led by experienced entrepreneurs, this company is on an exciting trajectory—perfect for ambitious engineers ready to make an outsized impact.
What You Will Do
- Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of the payments infrastructure, ensuring a secure and seamless experience for sellers and buyers.
- Triage, assess, and mitigate fraud at scale—across over 40,000 daily transactions and 150,000 active users.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product, legal, compliance, and GTM teams to shape product requirements and influence platform-level strategy.
- Make decisions about refunds, reserves, chargebacks, and seller onboarding risks through policy, automation, and engineering.
- Mentor other engineers and play a key role in hiring and growing the payments engineering team in San Francisco.
- Explore and deploy innovative financial technologies, such as banking-as-a-service and crypto integrations, to increase payment flexibility and resilience.
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 1–2 years in a technical leadership or team lead role.
- Strong background in building secure, high-scale financial systems, with a deep understanding of payments, chargebacks, risk, and fraud management.
- Experience working at high-growth startups or top-tier technology companies (e.g. Stripe, Plaid, Square, Pay Pal, or similar).
- Independent thinker who thrives in fast-moving environments and enjoys high levels of ownership and autonomy.
- Demonstrated ability to make product-minded technical decisions that improve customer trust and platform safety.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Experience with modern backend frameworks (e.g. Ruby on Rails, Node.js, etc.) and frontend stacks (Next.js, Type Script).
- Familiarity with payments operations, seller risk modeling, or financial compliance tooling.
- Prior experience founding or working in early-stage startups is a strong plus.
- Base Salary: $250k – $400k
- Equity: Generous equity grants with potential for $3M–$5M total comp
- Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- Perks: New office setup in San Francisco, flexible team-building resources, high-growth ownership track
- Culture: Fast-paced, highly autonomous, mission-driven—ideal for builders looking to make a mark
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