Senior Software Engineer, Recurring Credit

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;
Austin, Texas; and New York City, NY (opening Summer 2026).

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!

Recurring Credit is one of Upstart’s most ambitious new product bets: a mobile-first line of credit designed to replace payday loans, cash advance apps, and subprime credit cards with something safer and more sustainable. The team is small, senior, and moving quickly—structured more like a startup inside Upstart than a traditional squad. We’re building both a new product and a new model for how engineering teams can operate in an AI-native way: lean, fast, and deeply focused on outcomes for underserved consumers.

• Design and build core backend systems that power instant disbursements, subscription billing, and repayment schedules.
• Develop distributed, event-driven services that guarantee reliability and scale—covering retries, ordering, schema evolution, and observability.
• Translate product intent into customer impact by collaborating closely with product and design to ship high-quality user-facing features quickly.
• Leverage AI-native workflows (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, LLM-powered tooling) to accelerate coding, testing, and analysis.
• Ensure trust and transparency at the system level by instrumenting metrics, logs, and traces tied to business and user outcomes.
• Balance speed and quality in a greenfield codebase, helping set the technical direction for a product with zero-to-one momentum and long‑term scale.
• Shape engineering culture and velocity through thoughtful APIs, automation, and scalable practices.

Minimum requirements:

• 4+ years of experience building backend systems in production, ideally powering consumer‑facing products.
• Strong technical depth in distributed, event‑driven architectures (Kafka, SQS, Kinesis, MQ) including idempotency, retries, DLQs, and ordering.
• Proficiency in an OO language (Java, Kotlin, C#, Python, Ruby) and comfort with relational databases, caching layers, and API design.
• Demonstrated ability to ship zero‑to‑one systems or products, making tradeoffs in ambiguous environments.
• A track record of connecting backend work to product outcomes (conversion, reliability, payments, onboarding).
• Experience designing with observability and reliability in mind (metrics, traces, logs, SLOs).
• Active use of AI tools in engineering workflows beyond autocomplete, with curiosity about how AI changes how teams build.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to explain complex systems and tradeoffs clearly.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with fintech or payments systems such as disbursements, billing, ledgers, KYC/IDV, or credit/underwriting flows.
• Practical experience with instant funding rails and the challenges of fraud, reconciliation, and compliance.
• Familiarity with schema evolution and contracts (e.g., Protobuf, Avro) and safe data migrations in distributed systems.
• Track record of building or scaling consumer‑facing flows with measurable impact on conversion or reliability.
• Comfort navigating regulated domains and collaborating with legal, servicing, capital markets, or external partners.
• Evidence of tenure and progression within one company (promotions, expanding scope) and resilience through challenging product phases.
• Demonstrated interest in agentic or AI‑assisted systems, applying LLMs to…