Staff Backend Engineer - Card Processing Specialist (Remote) - job 1 of 2

Remote - US

Engineering – Engineering /Full-Time/ Remote

EMPOWER OVERVIEW

Empower is a high-growth financial technology company on a mission to expand access to fair credit to give anyone in the world the opportunity to improve their financial security and mobility. We dream up and launch one-of-a-kind features that help our members get money instantly whenever they need it, save for the future, and rewrite their financial story. Our members see Empower Cash Advance as a life-saver, Empower Automatic Savings as a game-changer, and the new Empower Thrive line of credit (currently in beta, launching soon) as a lifeline to low-cost borrowing and the only practical path to building good credit.

Empower is backed by Sequoia Capital, Blisce, and Icon Ventures. Inc. ranked Empower #55 in the 2022 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. Fast Company recognized Empower Thrive in their 2022 list of the Next Big Things in Tech.

Want to make a difference in someone’s journey to better credit? Let’s go.

THE EMPOWER WAY

Great Expectations: We come up with bold, audacious goals for ourselves and go all out for impact

Owner Mindset: We give every employee latitude to act independently, make smart choices, and move the business forward

Spirited Debate: We love skeptics and seek counter opinions to challenge our personal assumptions and expand our view

Customer Obsession: We listen to understand, empathize, and create a memorable, rewarding experience for our community

Inclusive Collaboration: We believe diverse teams make the best decisions, and we strive to give diverse voices a seat at the table

No Jerks Allowed: We value our relationships and take the time to build trust and connection and communicate respectfully

WHAT EMPOWER OFFERS

Competitive salary

Generous equity package

Full healthcare and dental benefits

Technology expense reimbursement

Work from anywhere

JOB DESCRIPTION

The Empower Server Software Engineer develops server software within the context of:

- Empower real-time card processing system

- Empower financial business system

- Interfacing the financial business system into the customer facing

- Empower mobile clients and internal back of house web portal

- Integrating into 3rd party services

This role has a high impact in creating a system that is reliable, available and serviceable, that meets our customer’s critical credit needs. As a Card Processing Specialist Staff Backend Engineer, you will be a key contributor to our card processing solutions, playing a crucial role in shaping the technical direction of our systems. Leveraging your expertise in designing and implementing card processing systems at scale, you will lead the development of robust, observable, and scalable solutions. Your responsibilities will encompass managing technological initiatives, executing projects, designing solutions, and reporting on progress. Additionally, you will take on leadership roles, including conducting interviews, mentoring fellow engineers, and leading incident responses.

Travel for company offsites is expected at a minimum 2 times a year.

Key Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities to foster optimal product direction, collaborate closely with business stakeholders to streamline and simplify designs, and proactively identify areas of risk and tradeoffs that can be enhanced.
• Ownership of technical initiatives, being accountable for the initiative's outcome, managing and executing the project, designing the solution and defining its requirements, reporting on the initiative's progress, and coordinating resources.
• Identifying technical and product opportunities inline with the organization’s objectives, creating proposals, gaining approval and execution to deliver outcomes.
• Perform as a lead technical interviewer
• Lead technical reviewer of Empower Engineering blog posts
• Aligns with Product roadmap and Engineering and Product OKR's to surface analytics to support the strategies
• Mentor Engineers up to and including Senior levels
• Lead SEV1 and lower incident response through to resolution
• Lead engineering of large scale and complex product initiatives
• Engineering lead for a delivery pod
• Accountable for engineering metrics and analytics, dashboards
• Operational Incident owner
• Culture leader across the engineering organization, delivery team and platform team

• Specialization:

• Solution Design: Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and architect card processing solutions that meet business requirements and are scalable, robust, and observable.
• Development: Write, test, and deploy server application code, adhering to secure coding standards and best practices.
• Leadership: Lead technical initiatives, taking ownership of project management, execution, and progress reporting. Act as a subject matter expert in card processing.
• Performance Monitoring: Continuously monitor the performance of our server applications with specific attention to card processing systems, identifying areas for improvement and optimization.
• Engage with card processing partners to develop integrations
• Ensure card authorization systems are meeting SLOs

Candidate Qualifications

• Minimum 10 years, ideally 15+ years developing web APIs within .NET (C#)
• Experience in designing and implementing card processing systems at scale.
• Experience with ORMs such as Entity Framework
• Experience constructing and optimising RDMS queries
• Experience within the asynchronous programming model
• General knowledge of Messaging Queues eg. AMQP
• General knowledge of PaaS environments eg. Azure

At Empower, we hire for people that push themselves to understand others and seek out ways to challenge their personal assumptions. Our hope is that by fostering such an environment, we strengthen our business and relationships by putting people first. We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workspace where everyone (regardless of age, education, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any personal characteristics) feels like they belong. Even if your experience doesn’t exactly match up to our job description, you should feel empowered to apply regardless!