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Salary: USD 160,000 - 295,000 / annual
Cardless is building infrastructure for companies to design, build, and launch their own financial products. Clients like Coinbase and Bilt use Cardless to create branded credit cards while Cardless handles lending, compliance, and operations behind the scenes. The company raised $60M in Series C funding (September 2025) and is scaling toward profitability by end of 2026.
As a Backend Engineer, you will work across systems that power partner card programs: applications and underwriting, accounts and ledgers, transactions and payments, rewards, risk, and partner-facing APIs. The role is deliberately general—engineers move to wherever the highest-value problem is. Work spans three categories: building new products partners need to launch, scaling and hardening existing systems as volume grows, and laying groundwork for future products including bringing more core financial infrastructure in-house.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build backend systems that move real money, make credit decisions, and serve hundreds of thousands of cardholders
- Take projects from ambiguity to production: scoping, design, implementation, testing, rollout, and ongoing operations
- Work across domains rather than staying in a single service
- Partner with product, risk, compliance, operations, and external counterparts to ship solutions in a regulated environment
- Improve reliability, observability, and developer experience continuously
The company values strong systems thinking over narrow domain expertise. Most backend work in fintech involves maintaining legacy systems; at Cardless, a large share of what will run in three years has not been built yet. You'll gain real ownership early, understand card programs end-to-end, and work with people committed to correctness.
This role is open at multiple levels (mid-level through staff); level is calibrated during the interview process.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong systems thinking and problem solving; ability to reason about unfamiliar systems, identify failure points, and make sound decisions with incomplete information
- Experience building and operating production backend services with a track record of shipping end-to-end projects
- Solid fundamentals in distributed systems, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
- Proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem (company uses primarily Java with Python for data work; prior experience with these languages is not required)
- Clear communication and genuine care about correctness (bugs directly impact cardholders)
BONUS:
- Fintech, payments, lending, or card issuing experience (authorization, ledgers, settlement, reconciliation, disputes, regulatory work)
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Step Functions) or event streaming
- Track record building and maintaining external, partner-facing APIs
NOT A FIT IF:
- You prefer owning one narrow service and staying within it
- You need fully specified requirements before starting
- You require remote work (this role is in-office 5 days per week)
