Payments Engineer - Series A fintech

Payments Engineer - Series A fintech

Location: San Francisco, CA (In-Office)

Partnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth Series A fintech startup to appoint a Payments Engineer to own the money-movement rails — card issuing, disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting — end to end.

About the Company & The Mission

EQL Tech is proud to represent a highly ambitious, well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds).

The $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life's work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.

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The Team

You will be joining an in-person company, working together in the office.

• The Founders: The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together. One previously worked as a Quant at Goldman Sachs, and the other built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally, serving 1M customers/day at age 19.
• The Core Team: You will work alongside top talent, including a founding engineer who did AI research at MILA and at Elon Musk's SpaceX school, a Head of Risk from Mercury, Stripe, and Circle, a Payments Engineer from Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Director at Arizona's ESA department — who will be one of your closest collaborators when it comes to what state agencies actually need from this system.

The Role: Payments Engineer

As Payments Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company's rails — card issuing, disbursements, reconciliation, and the regulatory reporting layered on top. You will work directly alongside the co-founders and the team's existing Payments Engineer (ex-Microsoft billing, ex-Goldman payments security) to build the technical backbone the company's mission depends on.

As Payments Engineer, you will:

• Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.
• Own card issuing and banking-rail integrations: work directly with partners like Lithic, Column, and LoanPro for card issuing, disbursements, and credit/loan management.
• Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.
• Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements).
• Payment Systems Architecture: Own and evolve a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs. Make architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including fraud and credit risk controls.

Requirements

Your Profile

• Obsessive About Correctness: You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis. Retries don't erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives — the database.
• Assumes the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors change APIs without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway — "reliable" to you means consistent behaviour at 10 payments or 10,000,000.
• Craves Ownership: You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving. You're not looking to contribute to a system — you want to have engineered it.
• High-Auditability Mindset: You're willing to go deep on a single missing transaction and trace it through every layer of the stack.
• Able to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)
• Experience with Lithic , Column , LoanPro , Stripe Issuing , or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus

Benefits

Commitment, Compensation & Benefits

This will be a big commitment, and we're aiming high. It needs to be something you are energised about taking on, or this isn't the team for you.

• Competitive Salary: $125,000 – $175,000 per year, commensurate with experience.
• Generous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.
• Top-Tier Backing: We've raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels.
• Relocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA, or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to visit customers. We're an in-person company and are in the office together.
• Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.
• Unmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year).