Founding Engineer - GovTech

Founding Engineer - Gov Tech

Location:

San Francisco, CA (In-Office)

Partnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup to appoint a Founding Engineer to build, from close to zero, the infrastructure behind a brand-new category of public-sector fintech.

EQL Tech is proud to represent a highly ambitious, well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds).

The $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life's work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.

You will be joining an in-person company, working together in the office.

• The Founders:
  The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together. One previously worked as a Quant at Goldman Sachs, and the other built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally, serving 1M customers/day at age 19.
• The Core Team:
  You will work alongside top talent, including a founding engineer who did AI research at MILA and at Elon Musk's SpaceX school, a Head of Risk from Mercury, Stripe, and Circle, a Payments Engineer from Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Director at Arizona's ESA department — who will be one of your closest collaborators when it comes to what state agencies actually need from this system.

The Role:

Founding Engineer, Gov Tech

There is no existing playbook for moving billions of dollars of state-administered education funds through a consumer card product — you will be one of the people who writes it. As Founding Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company's stack, from card issuing to disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting, and you will make the architecture calls yourself rather than inherit someone else's system.

This is a founding seat working directly alongside the co-founders, not a slot on an existing infra team.

As Founding Engineer, you will:

• Payment Systems Architecture:
  Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance health checks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up. Make the architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.
• Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.
• Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.
• Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.
• Ledger Integrity Reconciliation:
  Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing. You will build the automated health check and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, because none exist yet.