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Back End Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch (RFS Group)
New York, NY or Palo Alto, CA
HybridUSD 140,000 - 250,000 / year

About this role

Back End Engineer

Full time

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New York, New York | Hybrid

3 - 12 Years of Experience

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Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Back End Engineer

Location

New York, NY or Palo Alto, CA

Hybrid — 3+ days per week in-office. Strong preference for Palo Alto, with New York as an option. Remote may be considered for an exceptional candidate.

Company Stage of Funding

Growth Stage / VC-Backed

Office Type

Hybrid — 3+ days per week in-office

Salary

$140,000 – $250,000 Base

Flexibility available for exceptional candidates.

Equity

0.05% – 0.17% Equity

Visa Open to Visa Transfers, including OPT and H-1B transfers. Open to new H-1B sponsorships and other visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis.

Experience

  • 3+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend engineering and production API development experience.

  • Employment Type

  • Full-time

  • Hiring Count

  • 3–5 candidates

  • Company Description

  • This is a rapidly growing fintech infrastructure company building modern technology to transform a large, complex financial industry.

  • The company is rebuilding core industry infrastructure through software, creating a vertically integrated platform that automates complex workflows and enables banks, lenders, brokers, and other financial institutions to operate more efficiently.

  • The engineering organization is growing quickly, with approximately 15 engineers today and plans to significantly expand the team. Engineers work across several core areas including API infrastructure, underwriting, and integrations.

  • This role sits on the API team and focuses on building the core API that customers and developers directly interact with. The API is treated as a product in its own right, requiring thoughtful domain modeling, clear abstractions, strong developer experience, and reliable production systems.

  • The ideal candidate is a product-oriented backend engineer who can work closely with customers and subject matter experts, translate complex business requirements into simple software models, and take ownership of systems from architecture through production.

  • What You Will Do

    1. Build & Own the Core API Platform

  • Design, build, and maintain production-grade GraphQL APIs.

  • Own the core API as a customer-facing product rather than simply an internal backend service.

  • Develop clean, scalable abstractions that make complex business workflows intuitive for developers.

  • Own API versioning, breaking changes, documentation, and developer onboarding.

  • Design APIs that can evolve as the underlying business domain becomes more sophisticated.

  • Build reliable backend services using TypeScript and modern cloud infrastructure.

    1. Model Complex Business Domains

  • Translate complex financial workflows into clear, maintainable software models.

  • Define domain semantics and abstractions that accurately represent real-world business processes.

  • Design systems that support both current requirements and future product capabilities.

  • Work closely with subject matter experts to understand complex workflows and edge cases.

  • Simplify complicated business processes into intuitive developer-facing APIs.

  • Build thoughtful abstractions that reduce complexity and make workflows difficult to misuse.

    1. Build Event-Driven & Workflow Systems

  • Help evolve the backend architecture toward event-driven systems.

  • Build systems that proactively communicate what happened, why it happened, and what should happen next.

  • Work with workflow orchestration technologies such as Temporal.

  • Design reliable asynchronous workflows and backend services.

  • Build production systems capable of handling complex, multi-step business processes.

  • Improve reliability, observability, and scalability across backend services.

    1. Partner With Customers & Product Teams

  • Work directly with customers and subject matter experts to understand their needs.

  • Translate customer feedback into product and API improvements.

  • Partner with product and engineering teams to define requirements and prioritize features.

  • Help ensure APIs provide a strong developer experience for customers building directly on the platform.

  • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

  • Own features from initial requirements through design, implementation, launch, and iteration.

  • Ideal Candidate Background

  • Experience Requirements

  • 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.

  • Strong backend software engineering experience.

  • Experience building customer-facing backend services.

  • Experience designing and maintaining production APIs.

  • Experience working at a VC-backed startup or fast-paced, reputable technology company.

  • Experience in fintech, financial services, PropTech, mortgage, SaaS, e-commerce, marketplaces, or developer tooling is highly valued.

  • Experience gathering requirements from customers or subject matter experts and translating them into products or features.

  • Demonstrated ability to work in fast-moving environments with significant individual ownership.

  • Non-traditional career trajectories into software engineering are welcome.

  • Technical Requirements

  • Strong professional experience with TypeScript.

  • Strong experience designing and building production-grade GraphQL APIs.

  • Experience with backend frameworks such as NestJS.

  • Strong SQL and relational database experience.

  • Experience building scalable production backend services.

  • Strong understanding of API design, domain modeling, and software architecture.

  • Experience with event-driven architectures is a plus.

  • Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal is a plus.

  • Familiarity with AWS or other major cloud platforms.

  • Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, debugging, reliability, and maintainability.

  • Product & Domain Requirements

  • Strong product-oriented mindset.

  • Experience translating ambiguous business requirements into technical solutions.

  • Comfortable working directly with customers or subject matter experts.

  • Ability to model complex business domains into clear software abstractions.

  • Strong understanding of API design as a product surface.

  • Experience building software for non-technical users or customers.

  • Experience with fintech, insurance, logistics, SaaS, e-commerce, marketplaces, or other complex operational domains is a strong plus.

  • Openness to modern AI and LLM-enabled development practices is valued.

  • Experience with agentic workflows is a plus.

  • Soft Skills

  • High ownership and accountability.

  • Strong product instincts.

  • Comfortable operating in a fast-paced startup environment.

  • Strong communication and customer empathy.

  • Able to gather requirements and turn ambiguity into clear technical solutions.

  • Comfortable working closely with subject matter experts.

  • Strong problem-solving and systems-thinking skills.

  • Pragmatic and focused on building simple, durable abstractions.

  • Comfortable taking ownership from idea through production.

  • Curious and motivated by complex business problems.

  • Compensation & Benefits

  • $140,000 – $250,000 base salary.

  • Flexibility for exceptional candidates.

  • 0.05% – 0.17% equity.

  • Full-time position.

  • Hybrid work model with at least 3 days per week in-office.

  • Strong preference for Palo Alto, with New York City as an option.

  • Remote work may be considered for an exceptional candidate.

  • Open to visa transfers and new H-1B sponsorship.

  • Opportunity to work on foundational infrastructure in a large financial-services market.

  • Significant ownership over a core customer-facing API.

  • Why Join

  • Build the API that serves as a core product surface for a modern financial infrastructure platform.

  • Work on challenging domain-modeling problems where software directly represents complex real-world workflows.

  • Help modernize a large and highly fragmented financial industry.

  • Work closely with customers and subject matter experts.

  • Build production-grade GraphQL and event-driven systems.

  • Join a rapidly scaling engineering organization with significant room for ownership.

  • Work across API infrastructure, domain modeling, workflows, and customer-facing product development.

  • Have direct influence over architecture, developer experience, and product direction.

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