Software Engineer, Infrastructure (New York City or Remote)

Check is leading a revolution in the payroll industry. Payroll is the backbone of the US economy, and yet it has not undergone significant innovation in decades. We invented the embedded payroll space to change that (see: Check: Solving the $150 Billion Payroll Problem, Bank On It; Episode 438), both for the business owners who spend countless hours per week running payroll and for the millions of Americans who depend on their next paycheck. At Check, our mission is to empower the most innovative software platforms to create new payroll businesses, and enable those businesses to transform the way companies pay their employees.

Check’s culture is intensely caring: to each other as teammates, to our partners, and to the businesses and workers we serve. Our teams are made up of creative problem solvers and empathetic cross-functional collaborators who can simplify the complexities of payroll. We bring hustle and grit to our day-to-day, while building enduring solutions and relationships. 

As a payroll company, we're entrusted to pay a lot of people, on time, accurately, and we take that responsibility very seriously. For this role, we are seeking a software engineering leader with deep reliability and infrastructure engineering experience. You'll have an outsized impact on the reliability, security, and velocity of our product and our organization.

In this role, you will:

• Lead improvements to the scalability, security, and performance of the platform and develop effectiveness of our engineering organization alongside the CTO and a small, experienced team
• Identify, architect, build, and lead platform improvements to accelerate impact and encourage best practices across Engineering across scalability, observability, security, and reliability
• Build trust through exemplary individual contribution, collaboration, guidance, and mentorship of senior engineers, and creative problem-solving with functional leaders
• Manage and scale Check's infrastructure via infrastructure-as-code, balancing opportunity and cost management
• Advise senior management on system risks and work to determine an acceptable risk appetite while weighing overall business and usability impact
• Lead by example on an effective, sustainable, growth-oriented incident response culture
• Participate in threat modeling and mitigation with Security leadership
• Participate in product and engineering design reviews to incorporate high engineering standards

Many backgrounds could fit this role, but ideal candidates will have some or all of the following:

• Fluency with AWS, Python, Terraform, databases, networking, APIs, observability platforms
• Exercised and nuanced understanding of scalability principles, distributed systems, and cloud native architectures through experience working on critical systems
• Innate sense of ownership, along with the aptitude to navigate ambiguity, self-start, and create structure for oneself and others
• Experience setting up and adapting cloud and application infrastructure in rapidly changing environments
• Ability to communicate complex topics clearly to multiple audiences. Excellent, effective writing skills, with a bias toward documentation
• Demonstrated empathy for users and stakeholders and humility, enhancing a user-centric approach to system improvements
• Willingness and ability to attend our annual 3-day company offsite in the fall

Travel and Office Policy

The Check team is distributed across the US and Canada and we have offices in New York City and San Francisco. While we welcome remote work, we believe time together in person is valuable and important. We offer ample opportunities and encourage employees to attend team offsites, events, and hackathons a couple of times a year! We expect all employees to be willing to attend our annual 3-day company offsite in the fall.  

For our in-office and hybrid employees, our offices are open all week. We provide meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the team hosts regular happy hours, game nights, etc. 

What we offer: 

At Check we value transparency and trust. It’s important to us that every employee and candidate feels confident that they’ll be treated (and compensated) fairly on our team. The engineering team specifically operates on a flat titling system, meaning everyone is either a Software Engineer or an Engineering Manager. We structure our titles this way to maximize equity, inclusion and opportunity within our team, and to minimize seniority bias. We want all engineers, regardless of job level, to feel empowered to lead projects they’re passionate about and to collaborate with their fellow Checketeers as equals. 

To that end, we will consider candidates with a variety of backgrounds and levels of expertise for this role, and we will determine the appropriate job level for each candidate based on their unique experience and qualifications. The expected annual salary for this role is between $185,000 and $252,000, depending upon the job level.

In the US, Check offers company-sponsored medical, dental, vision, short-term/long-term disability and basic life insurance coverage to all full-time employees, effective on your first day of work. We also provide stock options, flexible PTO and sick leave, 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents and flexible return-to-work, 9 annual holidays, a 401k retirement plan, and a $100 monthly stipend for home internet and mobile phone expenses. Benefits may vary outside the US. 

Check is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Check is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at hello@checkhq.com with “accommodations” in the subject line.

Check participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information from all new employees to confirm that they are authorized to work in the U.S. Check does not use E-Verify to pre-screen applicants.