Senior Software Engineer, Recurring Credit

The Team

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.

How you’ll make an impact:

• 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.

What we’re looking for:

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 design, testing, analysis, or automation.

What you'll love:

• Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart
• Generous 401(k) plan with Upstart matching $2 for every $1 contributed, up to $15,000 per year
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Life and disability insurance
• Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave
• Supportive parental, family care, and military leave programs
• Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
• Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
• Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices

Position Location - This role is available in the following locations: Remote, San Mateo, Columbus, Austin

Time Zone Requirements - This team operates across all U.S. time zones.

Travel Requirements - This team has regular on-site collaboration sessions. These occur 3 days per quarter at an Upstart office. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.