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Check is rebuilding payroll infrastructure from the ground up. As the inventors of embedded payroll, the company powers businesses that run payroll at scale, serving thousands of employers across all industries. The payroll industry still runs on decades-old infrastructure, and Check is modernizing it by providing API-first platform infrastructure that lets businesses launch, grow, and thrive.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll combine strong engineering fundamentals with close collaboration across product, design, and operations to build systems that meaningfully improve how payroll businesses operate. You'll work on the platform that powers money movement, tax calculations, and compliance workflows for thousands of businesses, turning complex infrastructure into clear, reliable systems for partners.
Key responsibilities include:
- Running at complex problems across the platform, designing and building products that translate payroll infrastructure into intuitive tools for operators and partners
- Owning projects end-to-end: identifying problems, shaping solutions, design, implementation, rollout, and iteration based on real-world usage
- Partnering deeply with product, design, and operations to understand workflows and challenges faced by payroll operators
- Building internal and partner-facing tools that improve visibility, reliability, and explainability of money movement through the payroll system
- Reducing friction in systems by improving workflows, architecture, and tooling for developers and operators
- Role modeling clear, critical thinking through code, proposals, and diagrams that help teams align and move forward
- Raising quality standards by working in the open, giving thoughtful feedback, mentoring teammates, and helping ship work the team is proud of
Check's engineering culture operates as one unified team, with engineers staffed based on business priorities rather than fixed domains. The team is small, operates with high ownership, and doesn't let work sit waiting on ownership boundaries. Engineers stay close to each other's decisions and step in to move things forward when needed.
The company is distributed across the US with offices in New York City and San Francisco. While this role is remote, Check encourages attendance at team offsites, events, hackathons, and an annual 3-day company retreat in spring. Remote work requires the ability to perform all responsibilities without distraction while maintaining quality communication and productivity.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience with staff-level ownership and delivery of production systems end-to-end, from design through deployment and operation
- Experience building internal tools, developer platforms, or product systems that support complex operational workflows
- Ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces and bring structure through thoughtful design and collaboration
- Comfort debugging complex systems and investigating issues that span multiple services or infrastructure layers
- Ability to articulate technical tradeoffs to engineers and cross-functional partners
- While no specific programming language is required, experience with or willingness to learn Check's current stack is helpful: Python/Django, React, Typescript, AWS, Terraform, Postgres, Temporal, Github
