Staff Software Engineer (Fintech)

Job description

ABOUT US At Benepass we're making benefits easy. We believe people are the most important asset to any company. Traditional one-size-fits-all benefits packages no longer cut it in today's hybrid and remote-first environment. With Benepass, companies can tailor their benefits to the unique needs of their workforce. Through our easy-to-use and highly customizable fintech platform, People teams can implement, administer, and track the benefits that meet employees where they are. Employers design their benefits and perks plan by setting a contribution amount and eligible spend categories. Every employee has their own individual definition of wellness and needs different things to help them be their most productive, fulfilled self. OUR MISSION Helping companies reimagine how companies take care of their people. OUR INVESTORS We are backed by leading investors, including Centana Growth Partners, Portage Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Workday Ventures, and Clocktower Technology Ventures. To date, the company has raised approximately $75 million in equity capital. ARTICLES - Founder Story - Jaclyn Chen https://bit.ly/3FpQ0ti - Benepass Raises $40M Series B https://getbenepass.com/blog/benepass-raises-40m-series-b-to-help-employers-redesign-benefits-for-rising-healthcare-costs CANDIDATE RESOURCES - Benepass | Candidate Resource Page https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_OTFvktl-2SoxPn_tkZzyHECSKM0V14hVZOy1ZdZ8zE/edit?usp=sharing - Benepass Listed on Inc. Magazine's Best Workplaces of 2023 https://bit.ly/3EAXv0Q TEAM & ROLE Benepass is building financial infrastructure that powers how companies fund, control, and deliver benefits globally. We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own and evolve the systems at the core of our platform: ledgering, transaction processing, decisioning, and money movement. These systems are responsible for tracking and moving real funds, enforcing complex rules, and maintaining a precise and auditable source of truth. This is not a typical backend role. You will be working on high-integrity financial systems where correctness, consistency, and reliability matter more than raw throughput — and where small mistakes can have real financial impact. This role is ideal for engineers who have built or operated systems in payments, card issuing, wallets, banking infrastructure, or global money movement platforms, and want to take end-to-end ownership of a growing fintech layer. YOU WILL - Design and operate systems responsible for: - Ledgering (double-entry systems, balances, transaction history, reconciliation) - Transaction processing pipelines (authorization, capture, settlement flows) - Real-time decisioning (spend controls, eligibility, rules engines) - Money movement, including support for multi-currency and global transactions - Build systems that are correct by design: - Define and always maintain invariants to ensure correctness under all operational conditions - Idempotent - Strongly consistent where required - Fully auditable - Own the lifecycle of financial transactions end-to-end, including: - State transitions - Failure handling and retries - Reconciliation and reporting - Integrate with external financial partners (processors, banks, networks) and handle unreliable and asynchronous dependencies - Lead architectural decisions and write technical approach documents that clarify trade-offs and long-term implications - Improve system resilience, observability, and operational tooling as volume and complexity grow - Mentor other engineers and help define best practices for building financial systems OUR TECHNOLOGY AND STACK Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, React, TypeScript REQUIREMENTS - Experience building or operating financial systems such as payments, card issuing, wallets, or banking infrastructure - Deep understanding of fintech and payments ecosystems, including: - Card network fundamentals (e.g., ISO 8583 messaging, authorization/clearing/settlement flows) - Merchant acquiring and payment processor flows - How issuers, sponsor banks, and processor integrations work in practice - Familiarity with real-world transaction lifecycles across the stack (network → processor → ledger) - Experience designing or working on a ledger system, including: - Double-entry accounting concepts - Transaction lifecycles - Balance correctness and reconciliation - Experience building decisioning systems in production (e.g., transaction authorization, rules engines), ideally in real-time or latency-sensitive contexts - Experience working on systems that handle real money at scale (thousands of transactions per day or more) - Experience with global money movement, including: - Multi-currency systems - Currency conversion or FX considerations - Cross-border transactions (nice to have but strongly preferred) - Strong understanding of: - Data consistency and correctness - Idempotency and safe retries - Failure modes in distributed systems - Experience integrating with external financial APIs, including handling partial failures, timeouts, and eventual consistency - Proficiency in Python and relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) ABOUT YOU YOU THINK IN SYSTEMS, NOT ENDPOINTS You don’t just build APIs — you design systems that model real-world financial behavior. You understand how money moves through a system, how state changes over time, and how to ensure that state remains correct under failure. YOU OPTIMIZE FOR CORRECTNESS FIRST You prioritize: - Accurate balances over eventual fixes - Clear invariants over implicit assumptions - Systems that are easy to reason about under stress You’ve seen what goes wrong in financial systems — and you design to prevent it. YOU ARE COMFORTABLE WITH COMPLEXITY You’ve worked on systems with: - Multiple sources of truth (and resolved them) - Asynchronous workflows and external dependencies - Subtle edge cases (duplicates, race conditions, reconciliation gaps) And you know how to simplify where it matters. YOU TAKE OWNERSHIP OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE You are comfortable owning systems where: - Failures are visible and impactful - Debugging requires tracing through distributed systems - Long-term maintainability matters as much as short-term delivery YOU RAISE THE BAR FOR THE TEAM - You write clear design docs and communicate trade-offs effectively - You mentor other engineers in system design and domain understanding - You push for better patterns, better abstractions, and better systems THIS ROLE IS NOT A FIT IF: - You’ve primarily worked on CRUD-style backend systems without ownership of data integrity or system correctness - You prefer loosely defined systems where eventual consistency and approximation are acceptable - You have not worked with systems that move or track real money COMPENSATION Base salary of $200,000 to $240,000 + equity. #LI-DNI RANGE(S) IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. BENEPASS TAKES A NUMBER OF FACTORS INTO ACCOUNT WHEN DETERMINING INDIVIDUAL STARTING PAY, INCLUDING MARKET COMPARABLES, INTERVIEW PERFORMANCE, PEER COMPENSATION, AND YEARS OF EXPERIENCE. WHAT WE OFFER - 95% coverage of medical, dental, and vision - Fantastic benefits (of course 😃), including: - $250 WFH setup (one time) - $500/year Learning & Development Benefit - $150/month cell phone + internet - $100/month Wellness - $100/month Co-working and Commuter Benefit - We offer several team onsites a year - Flexible PTO At Benepass, we are working towards reimagining how companies take care of their people. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all our employees and are seeking to build a team that reflects the diversity of the people we hope to serve with our revolutionary products. Benepass is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer.