Founding Engineer - GovTech

About the role

The Founding Engineer will build the infrastructure behind a brand-new category of public-sector fintech. They will design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up. This role involves making architecture-level decisions on handling billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.

Responsibilities

• Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up.
• Make the 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.
• Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.
• Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.
• Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.
• Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing.
• Build the automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, because none exist yet.

Requirements

• Builds from zero: comfortable making the call when there's no precedent to point to.
• Obsesses about correctness: understands that a missing cent compounds into a crisis.
• Absorbs the real world is unreliable: builds systems that stay predictable anyway.
• Craves ownership: wants to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving.

Qualifications

• Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing, or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus.