About the Job
At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.
As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 3,000 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for...
We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that s...
Required Skills & Abilities
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience - plus 8 or more years of software engineering experience.
A track record of setting architecture and technical direction for large, complex distributed systems used across multiple teams or products.
Deep backend engineering experience and production proficiency in at least one of Python, Kotlin, or Java; willingness and ability to work effectively in a predominantly Python environment.
Experience designing or operating Tier 0/Tier 1 services with demanding latency, throughput, availability, and correctness requirements.
Strong understanding of APIs, service-oriented or modular architectures, containerization, cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS), and maintainable software design.
Hands-on technical judgment: you can move from strategy and architecture into concrete designs, prototypes, debugging, and critical implementation decisions.
Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex systems, constraints, and trade-offs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
Demonstrated success leading cross-organization technical decisions — balancing the needs of engineering, machine learning, and product teams — and influencing without direct authority.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and expanding the effectiveness and scope of other technical leaders.
Strong product and business judgment, including the ability to balance delivery, reliability, technical debt, risk, and long-term investment.
Experience building calculation-heavy, real-time decisioning, pricing, marketplace, risk, fraud, payments, trading, auction, or advertising systems.
Experience partnering with machine-learning teams or productionizing models at scale, including clear boundaries between modeling workflows and production services.
Experience modernizing a mature or tightly coupled platform through staged migration while continuing to deliver customer and business value.
Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, microservices, event-driven systems, and production observability.
Additional production experience with Rust or another performance-oriented language.
Background or applied exposure in statistics, mathematics, economics, econometrics, financial systems, or other quantitative domains.
Experience in a rapidly scaling or changing organization where architecture had to evolve alongside the business.
