Staff Engineer, Backend Engineering (RecordKeeper)

Human Interest is on a mission to ensure that people in all lines of work have access to retirement benefits. 

Nearly half of all working Americans are not saving enough for their future. Too often it’s because they are employed by a company that doesn’t offer a retirement plan. Human Interest is changing that by making it affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses to offer employees a path to financial independence through retirement savings.

We’re a high-growth tech company changing the retirement industry. We’ve raised $500M and are backed by leading investors. Most recently, by funding from BlackRock as well as many other top investors: TPG (The Rise Fund) with SoftBank led our Series D, Glynn Capital, NewView Capital, USVP, Wing, Uncork, and others.

Join our amazing Engineering team

Our engineering organization aims to redefine the retirement services space with software that provides an effortless, efficient, scalable, and reliable user experience. 

• We value continuous improvement, emphasizing documentation, security, consistency, and scalability.
• We help each other be better engineers, ensuring we leave things better than we found them.
• We are customer-focused, ensuring our software improves the customer experience.

About the role

In this impactful, hands-on senior technical leadership role, you will drive the technical direction for our organization of over 20 engineers across 4 agile teams. You will provide technical guidance and mentorship, define and refine our architecture, processes, and best practices. Collaborating with domain experts and engineers, you will design, build, test, and own systems for servicing 401(k) plans. Reliability and performance are key, so you will extend our system’s robustness, scalability, observability, and maintainability.

About the team

The Recordkeeping team is responsible for bookkeeping of all the retirement plans served by Human Interest. The recordkeeping platform standardizes all transacting and trading on behalf of retirement plans and participants. All money movements utilize the recordkeeping platform, including contributions, roll-overs, distributions, loans, and more. The transactional, trade, and position data housed by the recordkeeping platform power robust reporting for all financial and trading activity, including descriptive data that tells the full story of the activity. This team is critical to the success of the business, being a foundational platform to record all the financial activities.

What you get to do every day

• Define forward-looking architectures through designs, establishing tradeoffs in cost vs. value, and gaining buy-in from key stakeholders.
• Drive the delivery of prototypes, technical standards, project plans, and roadmaps that align with the product vision.
• Coach and mentor senior engineers to improve innovation, efficiency, and technical capabilities.
• Deliver features and enhancements that improve complex processes and systems, making them more robust and higher performance with less human intervention.
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to share knowledge and build expertise.
• Raise the bar for team standards, resulting in cleaner, well-documented, and higher-quality code.
• Model and teach key behaviors for owning and delivering fast, horizontally scalable, and reliable systems.
• Advocate for forward-looking architectures and designs that minimize human intervention while keeping development costs incremental.

What you bring to the role

• Minimum 10 years of professional experience designing, building, and maintaining large-scale backend software products and systems.
• Expertise in designing and building modular distributed applications to support a rapidly growing customer base.
• Solid understanding of auto-scaling cloud technologies and efficient use of compute, storage, network, and virtualization technologies (preferably AWS).
• Ability to influence cross-team standards, practices, and tools by modeling behaviors and demonstrating outcomes.
• Clear articulation of the business benefits resulting from technical decisions.
• Enjoy mentoring other engineers and helping them grow technically, becoming a key go-to person in your company.
• Experience delivering large-scale backend systems, managing elastic workloads using queue/worker and streaming architectures.
• Experience migrating to modern scalable technologies from monolithic systems while maintaining high reliability and availability.
• Ability to quickly grasp the workings of accounting and 401k domains.
• Strong desire to learn, exchange feedback, and grow—from internal legacy and futuristic technical designs to retirement domains and workflows critical for our business.

Why you will love working at Human Interest

Mission - Highly collaborative startup dedicated to supporting employee engagement and growth. It’s an opportunity to help solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in America: saving for retirement.

Culture - Our operating principles define how we come together as a team to do our work. They reflect Human Interest’s unique view on what’s important and what’s right. Documenting this core aspect of our culture helps employees make good decisions on their own. It also helps candidates considering career opportunities critically evaluate whether they will thrive at Human Interest. 

• Customer obsession
• Long-term orientation
• Autonomous and accountable teams
• An escalating bar for talent and performance 
• Fundamental optimism 

Compensation - At Human Interest, there are a number of factors that are used to determine the appropriate pay range for each position. We take into account the cost of labor for each position in various markets across the US. The base salary for this position spans $245,000 - $275,000 and represents the minimum in our lowest geographic region to a maximum in our highest geographic region. The salary that we offer to a new employee within this range is based on their location within the US, their relevant job-related skills, and experience. At Human Interest, base salary is one component of the overall Total Rewards package. Depending on the position, additional compensation components such as bonus, commission, and equity may be offered. All of our employees are offered a robust suite of physical, financial and mental wellness benefits.

Benefits - 

• A great 401(k) plan: Our own! Our 401(k) includes a dollar-for-dollar employer match up to 4% of compensation (immediately vested) and $0 plan fees
• Top-of-the-line health plans, as well as dental and vision insurance
• Generous PTO and parental leave policies
• Addition Wealth - Unlimited access to digital tools, financial professionals, and a knowledge center to help you understand your equity and support your financial wellness
• Lyra - Enhanced Mental Health Support for Employees and dependents  
• Carrot - Fertility healthcare and family forming benefits
• Candidly - Student loan resource to help you and your family plan, borrow, and repay student debt
• Monthly work-from-home stipend; quarterly lifestyle stipend
• Employee Resource Groups including Veterans, Lift Ev’ry Voice, Pride, LatinX, Families, and Women in Tech
• Fun online and regional events and celebrations and department and company offsites
• The vast majority of our positions can be 100% remote
  

We’re a great place to work (but don’t take our word for it) 

Here’s a list of our awards and accolades:

• Certified as a Great Place To Work® (2023-2024)
• Best Places to Work by Built In (2023-2024)
• America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes (2020-2022, 2024) 
• A Top Company by Y Combinator (2020-2023)
• Inc. Fastest Growing Companies (2021)

Human Interest is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran or military status, pregnancy, or any other characteristics protected under federal, state, or local laws.

Human Interest employees must adhere to the Company’s security policies and Code of Ethics. 

Please note Human Interest does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than directly from candidates. We will not consider resumes from vendors including and without limitation search firms, staffing agencies, fee-based referral services, and recruiting agencies. 

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment-qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We comply with CCPA guidelines. See more: https://humaninterest.com/disclosures