Forward Deployed Engineer - Modernizing Public Services

About the role

The Forward Deployed Engineer will design and build critical components of the company's financial infrastructure, ensuring smooth and secure transactions while minimizing operational risks.

Responsibilities

• Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay
• Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports
• Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements)
• Own and evolve a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs
• Make architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls
• Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing

Requirements

• Obsessive About Correctness: You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis. Retries don't erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives — the database.
• Absorbs the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors change APIs without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway — "reliable" to you means consistent behavior at 10 payments or 10,000,000.
• Craves Ownership: You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving. You're not looking to contribute to a system — you want to have engineered it so that emergencies are rare and recoverable when they happen.
• High-Auditability Mindset: You're willing to go deep on a single missing transaction and trace it through every layer of the stack. You build tooling that lets you and your team investigate mismatches fast, not the next morning.