Lead Software Engineer

Job description

Fundrise is a financial technology company on a mission to build a better financial system for the individual. With more than 2 million users and over $3 billion in assets under management, we are the largest direct-to-investor alternative asset platform in the United States, making institutional-quality real estate, private credit, and venture capital investments accessible to anyone. Through the software we build, we are democratizing the private investment industry. We continue to push into new territory: our Innovation Fund (VCX) recently listed on the NYSE as one of the first public venture capital funds, and our AI subsidiary, RealAI, is bringing institutional-grade real estate intelligence to everyday investors and professionals. Fundrise has been recognized by CNBC's World's Top Fintech Companies (2024, 2025) and the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for three consecutive years (2023-2025). **While this is a fully remote role, candidates in the Washington, D.C. metro area are strongly preferred. Proximity to our team and business partners helps support in-person collaboration when needed.** We're seeking a Lead Software Engineer to manage a team within our API Engineering group. This team owns the services at the core of Fundrise’s investor application: the APIs that drive authentication, investing, account management, and more, and it drives everything underneath our flagship investor web, iOS, and Android applications. As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll be measured on the output, quality, and growth of your team. This is a people-management role in which you'll set technical direction, coach engineers, and help drive outputs through daily hands-on software engineering, making sound architectural calls, and solving the problems no one else can crack. Success in this role looks like a team that quickly and consistently turns product, operational, and compliance requirements into software to drive Fundrise forward. In this role, you will: - Manage and mentor a team of software engineers through effective weekly one-on-ones, deliberate delegation, and growth feedback - Own your team's delivery, breaking down work, coordinating across teams, and shipping against ambitious but achievable timelines - Hold the team to a high quality bar of production code, conducting thorough code reviews and making merge and deployment decisions - Drive design and architecture for Fundrise services and contribute to a long-term team roadmap - Partner with Product, Design, and other Engineering stakeholders across the organization to quickly implement complex functionality - Champion application security as a critical part of the work in a regulated financial services environment - Own production monitoring and triage across our services and third-party integrations ### Who You Are You spend much of your day writing code, and you measure success by what you can ship as a team rather than by your own output alone. Your technical choices are pragmatic and always in service of building what's best for users. You hold yourself and your team to a high technical standard, and you think about solutions across multiple problem domains: performance, security, maintainability, architecture, and implementation detail. You can quickly evaluate a new technology, pattern, or language and adopt it when it genuinely serves the problem. You understand how to apply AI effectively to your own daily work and to raising your team's output without treating it as an autopilot. You form clear opinions and advocate for them, and once a direction is set you commit to it fully. You find real satisfaction in making an established, high-stakes platform a little better every day. You give direct feedback and expect the same in return, and accept responsibility for all outcomes. ### Minimum Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including deep expertise in Java, Spring / Spring Boot, and Hibernate - 3+ years leading and managing engineers: running 1:1s, driving team performance through candid feedback, and owning your team's delivery, quality, and growth - 4+ years building and maintaining production applications on AWS, including services like ECS, CDK, S3, SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB and WAF - A deep understanding of transactional database design and operations - A track record of improving existing systems in operationally complex environments ### Preferred Qualifications - Demonstrated experience building and maintaining secure software, including a solid understanding of common threats and principles for writing secure code - Comfortable tackling problems without obvious answers, and can rapidly absorb new languages and frameworks in order to implement the best software solutions - Experience managing high performing engineering teams in - A passion for working backwards from the outcomes the business needs to the engineering decisions that will achieve them ### Benefits at Fundrise - Remote-first work environment (must live in the United States) - Competitive medical, dental, and vision insurance, with Fundrise contributing to both employee and dependent premiums - Flexible Spending Accounts for medical expenses, dependent care, and parking - 401(k) with 3% contributed by Fundrise, regardless of whether you are actively contributing yourself - Fully covered life insurance and short-term disability - Significant equity via our employee stock grant program - Gympass benefit including mental health resources - Flexible PTO - Employee Assistance Program - Paid parental leave