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Salary: USD 190,000 - 295,000 / annual
Cardless is building infrastructure for companies to design, build, and launch their own branded financial products. The company powers credit card programs for partners like Coinbase and Bilt, handling lending, compliance, and operations while partners maintain full control and branding. Cardless raised $60M Series C in September 2025 (total $170M) and is scaling toward profitability by end of 2026.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you own the complete technical journey of bringing new partners from signed contract to live card program. You work hands-on with code on both sides of the integration. Each launch begins with a partner who has a product, existing app, engineering team, and constraints. You scope the work together, design the integration, write the guides their team builds against, and shepherd them to production. This includes coordinating risk, compliance, processor, and bank work required for launch.
You develop product sense for where Cardless's card, application surface, and offer surfaces belong within each partner's app and onboarding flow. You write integration guides, API specs, and sandbox tooling that partners use to self-serve. You make judgment calls on which partner requests warrant bespoke solutions versus platform features, then invest in the integration platform so each successive launch is faster. You travel to partners, run onsites and workshops, and unblock launches by coordinating across risk, compliance, processor, and bank partners.
The role is high-leverage: every partner launch is revenue, and you are the engineer it runs through. You'll see more of Cardless's system than almost anyone, work directly with engineering teams at world-class companies, and have unusual influence over the product roadmap because you know what partners actually need.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 6+ years building production backend systems, including work shipped with a partner or customer in the loop (not just behind a product manager)
- Deep systems knowledge; ability to hold end-to-end flows in your head and debug partner integrations faster than they can
- Strong partner communication skills: can run technical conversations with partner engineers and explain tradeoffs to their business teams without losing substance
- Product sense you'll use: can reason about where card application, offer, and servicing surfaces belong in a partner's journey and make the case for different placement when needed
- Sound judgment on bespoke versus platform decisions; ability to say no and explain why certain requests don't make sense
BONUS:
- Fintech, payments, or card issuing experience (especially with processors, networks, or bank partners)
- Prior forward deployed, solutions, or deployed engineering role at a platform company
- API design and developer experience (OpenAPI, SDKs, codegen, sandbox environments, versioning)
- Experience turning one-off customer builds into real product features
NOT A FIT IF:
- You want to stay in the codebase and avoid partner conversations
- You need a stable roadmap (launch dates move and partners escalate)
- You can't travel or want to work remotely
