Software Engineer - Core Platform San Francisco, CA

At Pave, we're building the industry’s leading compensation platform, combining the world's largest real-time compensation dataset with deep expertise in AI and machine learning. Our platform is perfecting the art and science of pay to give 8,500+ companies unparalleled confidence in every compensation decision.

Top tier companies like OpenAI, McDonald’s, Instacart, Atlassian, Synopsys, Stripe, Databricks, and Waymo use Pave, transforming every pay decision into a competitive advantage. $190+ billion in total compensation spend is managed in our workflows, and 70% of Forbes AI 50 use Pave to benchmark compensation.

The future of pay is real-time & predictive, and we’re making it happen right now. We’ve raised $160M in funding from leading investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Craft Ventures.

Pave's R&D pillar includes our data science, engineering, information technology, product design, product management, and security teams. This organization builds, maintains, and secures a platform used by more than 8,500+ client organizations.

Compensation strategy is broken down into 3 pillars
- compensation bands
, planning workflows
, and
total rewards communication
. We build products that make these processes seamless for customers.

Over the next year, our roadmap is focused on enhancing the entire compensation lifecycle: from philosophy definition to market trend analysis, band adjustments, merit cycles, and employee communication. We're seeking passionate engineers who are excited about building robust, data-rich systems that simplify complex compensation processes at scale.

Learn more about our engineering principleshere !

The Core Platform team sits at the center of Pave Engineering, bridging product and platform engineering. We build the foundational services, APIs, and abstractions that enable every team to ship enterprise-grade software with speed and confidence. In this role, you’ll own critical services like user authentication and authorization, as well as the foundational data infrastructure and models powering Pave’s compensation intelligence platform.

Success in this role requires strong systems thinking and the ability to drive large, complex initiatives across the organization.

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience building data intensive applications, ideally utilizing modern web technologies such as Type Script and Node.js
• Strong product intuition with the ability to design generalized platform solutions that solve cross-product challenges
• Hands‑on experience with data infrastructure, data pipelines/ ETLs, data modeling; ML/AI platform experience a plus
• Experience leading large technical projects with high ambiguity and numerous stakeholders
• Execution‑driven mindset:
  You thrive in fast‑paced environments, bias toward action, and ship thoughtful solutions with maintainability and scalability in mind

Our stack includes: Type Script, Node.js, MySQL, Prisma, and React, hosted on GCP

Salary is just one component of Pave's total compensation package for employees. Your total rewards package at Pave will include equity, top‑notch medical, dental, and vision coverage, an unlimited PTO policy, and many other region‑specific benefits. Your level is based on our assessment of your interview performance and experience, which you can always ask the hiring manager about to understand in more detail.

This salary range may include multiple levels.

The targeted cash compensation for this position is (level depends on experience and performance in the interview process):

P2: $141,100 - $190,900
P3: $166,600 - $225,400
P4: $195,500 - $264,500

Since being founded in 2019, Pave has established a robust global footprint. Headquartered in San Francisco's Financial District, we operate strategic regional hubs across New York City's Flatiron District, Salt Lake City, and the United Kingdom. We cultivate a vibrant, collaborative workplace culture through our hybrid model, bringing teams together in‑person on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays to foster…