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Salary: USD 195,000 - 230,000 / annual
Forage is building the modern payments stack for inclusive commerce, enabling grocers, delivery platforms, and point-of-sale systems to accept EBT payments both online and in-store. The company serves 42 million Americans on food assistance and is backed by leading fintech investors.
As a Founding Product Engineer, you'll partner closely with the Product Lead to identify, prototype, launch, and scale new consumer financial products across the Forage app, online and in-store grocery checkout, and emerging product surfaces. These products will help consumers save money, earn supplementary income, build and access credit, increase purchasing power, and better manage their financial lives.
This is a highly entrepreneurial role requiring you to work across the full stack. You won't receive fully defined requirements; instead, you'll collaborate with Product and Design to understand users, identify opportunities, evaluate solutions, and determine what to build and how to build it quickly and responsibly. One week you might prototype a new consumer experience; the next, you could design backend services, APIs, integrations, or data models.
Key responsibilities include: building financial products from 0 to 1; owning products end-to-end from architecture through launch and scale; participating in product discovery and challenging assumptions; moving quickly from idea to customer through prototyping and shipping; working across consumer applications, backend services, APIs, data models, and infrastructure; developing intuitive consumer experiences for complex financial products; integrating with financial institutions, fintech platforms, retailers, and delivery platforms; using data to improve products; making thoughtful engineering decisions in a regulated environment; establishing technical foundations for a new product area; and helping build the team as an early engineer.
Requirements:
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally building consumer-facing products from 0 to 1
- Strong full-stack engineering skills with ability to independently build and ship complete product experiences
- Product mindset with deep care for customer problems, not just technical implementation
- Experience working in highly ambiguous environments where requirements evolve as you learn
- Track record of moving quickly from idea to prototype to production while maintaining quality
- Strong frontend experience with modern frameworks (React, TypeScript) and willingness to build backend systems
- Experience designing backend services, APIs, integrations, and data models
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, testing, debugging, performance, scalability
- Ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, quality, UX, and long-term scalability
- Strong communication and collaboration skills across Product, Design, Data, Legal, Security, and business teams
- High degree of ownership and comfort independently driving projects from loosely defined problems to measurable outcomes
- Excitement about advancing food access, financial inclusion, and financial opportunity for millions of Americans
Preferred technical experience includes: TypeScript, React, HTML/CSS (frontend); Python, Django, REST APIs (backend); AWS and cloud-native architectures (infrastructure); relational databases, data modeling, analytics, experimentation (data); distributed systems, asynchronous processing, scalable APIs (systems); financial APIs, payments infrastructure, banking platforms (integrations); automated testing, CI/CD, observability, monitoring (engineering practices). Experience in fintech, payments, ecommerce, consumer financial products, marketplaces, or regulated consumer environments is a plus but not required.
The role is hybrid in New York or San Francisco with consideration for remote within North America on a case-by-case basis (defined as 2-3 days in office). No visa sponsorship available; applicants must have work authorization that does not require sponsorship.
