Software Engineer, Home Lending Growth

The Team

As a software engineer on the Home Lending team, you’ll grow Upstart’s newest product: home equity line of credit (HELOC).

Why home loans? Millions of homeowners are locked into long-term low-interest mortgages and looking for a way to access their equity. By securing a loan against their house, we can lend them fast, affordable credit for remodels, big purchases, or paying off debt. This is a huge category of consumer credit, and it’s where we can make our biggest impact.

Why us? The market has left behind millions of Americans with imperfect credit or difficult-to-document income. Serving these customers is our bread and butter, and it’s core to our mission. Because we use machine learning and automation to assess credit-worthiness, we can offer a faster experience at a better price.

We want our team to reflect the people we’re serving. To serve customers at the fringes, we need people who think at the fringes—weird, quirky, out-of-the-box do-ers who reason from first principles and not from the status quo. We leave our ego at the door and crave being proven wrong. We're a high-empathy team, and we succeed as a team first, individuals second.

You’ll be the first engineer on our newest sub-team: Home Lending Growth. Your mission: expand the product’s reach. You’ll partner daily with a PM, a marketer, an ML specialist, and an analyst, delivering features across email, SMS, web, and partner sites. You’ll work heavily across teams and at times across companies. You thrive on autonomy and novelty and work best in small, diverse, cross-functional teams. While you might currently specialize in the frontend or the backend, you’re eager to learn both well. And since you’ll be working across various codebases, your curiosity is a driving force for speed.

Beyond leveraging our existing tech (Ruby, Kotlin, React, AWS, Kafka, Spring, and Postgres), here’s how you’ll make an impact:

• Proactively search out ways to make an impact beyond the Jira board
• Turn feature-specific tasks into opportunities to up-level the team’s codebase and product
• Know the product intimately enough to propose changes to requirements when we need to find a middle path
• Propose and deliver new ideas that achieve meaningful improvements to our team’s metrics

What we’re looking for: 

• Minimum requirements:
  • 3+ years professional experience in fullstack software
  • 3+ years proficiency in Ruby, Kotlin, Java, or C#. (Our backend is Ruby and Kotlin, but Java and C# are similar enough that you can learn on the job.)
  • Some hands-on experience with a JavaScript framework like React
  • Some hands-on experience with SQL databases and domain modeling
• Preferred qualifications:
  • Excellent written and verbal communication. As an engineer, a big part of your job will be representing your projects in cross-functional conversations, and you’ll need to tailor your communication style to fit these different audiences’ needs.
  • Preference for face-time and synchronous collaboration. We’re a distributed team of remote workers (from coast to coast), and we prefer facetime when collaborating in a tight feedback loop. You’ll need to be comfortable with a few hours of Zoom per day to excel in this role.
  • Comfortable challenging authority. We want engineers who can push back on their managers and partners when they think we’re going down the wrong path. Related: you thrive in environments where you are expected to think like an owner and make decisions like one.

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. But our team still has regular onsite collaboration sessions. These occur roughly once per quarter (~3 days at a time) in one of our main offices (Columbus, Austin, or San Mateo). If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel-related expenses.

What you'll love: 

• Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart 
• 401(k) with 100% company match up to $4,500 and immediate vesting and after-tax savings
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Life and disability insurance
• Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave  
• Supportive parental, family care, and military leave programs
• Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
• Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
• Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices

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