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Salary: USD 165,000 - 185,000 / annual
Clasp is a venture-backed fintech startup transforming access to education and career pathways through employer-sponsored student loan repayment (Clasp Talent) and institutional lending technology for colleges (Clasp Finance). The company is a Forbes Fintech 50 honoree and SHRM portfolio company.
You will lead Clasp Talent's new Foundations team, which owns the core services and infrastructure that all product teams depend on: user management and SSO, notifications, data exchange with employers and schools, and shared platform patterns. Your mission is to make these building blocks reliable, well-documented, and easy for other teams to adopt so product teams ship faster without rebuilding common infrastructure.
This is a player-coach role. You will write and review code every week, set technical direction for the team, and mentor engineers of all levels. You'll partner with product, domain teams, and technical leadership to decide what belongs in the foundation. You'll use AI tools deliberately to move faster, have strong opinions about APIs and system design, and can explain technical tradeoffs to non-engineers in ways that drive decisions.
Key responsibilities:
- Own technical direction for shared services: user management, authentication, SSO, RBAC, and notification systems (email, in-app, other channels).
- Design and evolve data exchange approaches: APIs, events, webhooks, file-based integrations with employers, schools, HRIS, and partner systems, with clear contracts, versioning, and observability.
- Build reusable services, libraries, and patterns that domain teams adopt with minimal friction; treat other engineering teams as customers.
- Write code across front end and back end; set the bar for code quality, system design, and security through hands-on contribution and code review.
- Work with Product, Security, and Compliance to define requirements for identity, access, consent, and data handling in a regulated financial-services environment.
- Break large initiatives into milestones, spec stories, and balance platform investment against feature requests from domain teams.
- Mentor and coach engineers; build a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. No direct reports at start, with a path toward managing people as the team grows.
- Apply AI-assisted development (code generation, test writing, refactoring, documentation) to raise quality and speed.
- Build resilient, self-healing systems using infrastructure as code, monitoring, and alerting; participate in on-call rotation.
The company runs a DevOps culture where engineers own the code they write and the infrastructure it runs on. You'll shape the architecture behind the product roadmap and Clasp's business while growing alongside the team.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent bootcamp/upskilling program experience.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time leading technical direction for a team or shared platform at a SaaS startup or similar environment.
- Experience designing APIs and integration patterns used by other teams or external partners, with attention to contracts, backward compatibility, and documentation.
- Strong fluency in Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI, or similar) and TypeScript/JavaScript (React, Next.js), and PostgreSQL-backed data models.
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar), cloud infrastructure (AWS or Google Cloud), infrastructure as code, and production monitoring.
- Experience working with Product and Compliance or Security teams in financial services or another regulated environment.
- AI-native workflow: you use coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc.) as a real force multiplier and are excited about AI's potential for engineering.
- Strong written and verbal communication; can articulate technical tradeoffs, align stakeholders, and make sound decisions under ambiguity.
- Genuine interest in technology that expands access to education and economic mobility.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Hands-on experience designing and operating identity and access systems: authentication, SSO (SAML, OIDC, OAuth), user provisioning (SCIM), role-based permissions.
- Experience building notification or messaging systems (transactional email, templating, preferences, delivery tracking, retries) or similar event-driven infrastructure.
- Experience building internal platform or "paved road" capabilities that multiple product teams adopt.
- Experience with enterprise customers' identity requirements (IdP integrations, domain verification, just-in-time provisioning).
- Familiarity with HRIS or ATS integrations, or education data standards.
- Experience with data privacy and security frameworks (SOC 2, FERPA, GLBA) and their technical implications.
- Prior experience mentoring engineers or moving into engineering management.
