Founding Engineer - GovTech

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Department: Engineering, Product & Tech

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

Description

Founding Engineer - GovTech

Location: San Francisco, CA (In-Office)

Partnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup to appoint a Founding Engineer to build, from close to zero, the infrastructure behind a brand-new category of public-sector fintech.

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.

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: Founding Engineer, GovTech

There is no existing playbook for moving billions of dollars of state-administered education funds through a consumer card product — you will be one of the people who writes it. As Founding Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company's stack, from card issuing to disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting, and you will make the architecture calls yourself rather than inherit someone else's system. This is a founding seat working directly alongside the co-founders, not a slot on an existing infra team.

As Founding Engineer, you will:

• Payment Systems Architecture: Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up. Make the architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.
• Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.
• 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) as the system scales from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.
• Ledger Integrity Reconciliation: Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing. You will build the automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, because none exist yet.

Requirements

Your Profile

• Builds From Zero: You'd rather design the first version of a system than optimize someone else's. You're comfortable making the call when there's no precedent to point to.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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).