Principal Software Engineer, Pricing Platform

About the role

Upstart is a leading AI lending marketplace that partners with banks to expand access to affordable credit, using advanced AI and over 1,800 signals per borrower. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Core Pricing team, you will provide technical leadership across engineering, machine learning, and product organizations, shaping the long-term architecture, strategy, and operating model for pricing systems that serve multiple product lines and stakeholders across the company.

About Upstart

At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence. As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 3,000 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers.

Responsibilities

• Define the cross-company technical vision and roadmap for Upstart’s pricing platform, ensuring alignment across Pricing, Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, ML, and Product organizations.
• Lead the architectural evolution from tightly coupled, sequential workflows toward modular, reusable platform capabilities across loan products.
• Design and improve Tier 0/Tier 1 services where latency, throughput, availability, and financial correctness are all critical.
• Partner closely with machine-learning scientists and engineers to create reliable, scalable boundaries between models and production pricing systems.
• Balance the sometimes-competing needs of engineering, machine learning, and product teams across organizations, making pragmatic trade-offs that serve Upstart’s broader technical and business strategy.
• Clarify service, API, configuration, and ownership boundaries across Pricing, Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, and adjacent platform teams.
• Evaluate runtime and language choices pragmatically, including where Python, Kotlin, Rust or Go best serve long-term system needs.
• Reduce operational burden through better testing, observability, failure isolation, incident learning, and architecture that limits blast radius.
• Lead company-wide technical discussions, surface trade-offs clearly, and build alignment across Engineering, ML, Product, Data, Security, Compliance, and business partners.
• Stay close to implementation through design reviews, prototypes, and critical code while mentoring senior technical leaders and making the people around you more successful.
• Prioritize technical-debt and platform investments based on business value, risk reduction, and long-term return rather than technical elegance alone.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field – or equivalent practical experience – plus 8 or more years of software engineering experience.
• A track record of setting architecture and technical direction for large, complex distributed systems used across multiple teams or products.
• Deep backend engineering experience and production proficiency in at least one of Python, Kotlin, or Java; willingness and ability to work effectively in a predominantly Python environment.
• Experience designing or operating Tier 0/Tier 1 services with demanding latency, throughput, availability, and correctness requirements.
• Strong understanding of APIs, service-oriented or modular architectures, containerization, cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS), and maintainable software design.
• Hands-on technical judgment: you can move from strategy and architecture into concrete designs, prototypes, debugging, and critical implementation decisions.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex systems, constraints, and trade-offs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-organization technical decisions — balancing the needs of engineering, machine learning, and product teams — and influencing without direct authority.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and expanding the effectiveness and scope of other technical leaders.
• Strong product and business judgment, including the ability to balance delivery, reliability, technical debt, risk, and long-term investment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building calculation-heavy, real-time decisioning, pricing, marketplace, risk, fraud, payments, trading, auction, or advertising systems.
• Experience partnering with machine-learning teams or productionizing models at scale, including clear boundaries between modeling workflows and production services.
• Experience modernizing a mature or tightly coupled platform through staged migration while continuing to deliver customer and business value.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, microservices, event-driven systems, and production observability.
• Additional production experience with Rust or another performance-oriented language.
• Background or applied exposure in statistics, mathematics, economics, econometrics, financial systems, or other quantitative domains.
• Experience in a rapidly scaling or changing organization where architecture had to evolve alongside the business.

Position location

Remote United States

Travel requirements

As a digital-first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. Most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2–4 consecutive days at a time for in-person collaboration.

Pay

Anticipated base salary range: $195,300—$270,400 USD (actual pay varies by geographic location and is determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training).