Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, Community Building

About the role

Acorns, the financial wellness app, is building a new Community product team from scratch. This is a small, senior group with a single mandate: Get people addicted to saving by unlocking network effects inside Acorns. This team understands how to create engagement loops, virality, and habit formation. We want people who’ve mastered those mechanics and are ready to use them for something that improves people’s lives.

As a Senior Full-Stack Engineer on this team, you’ll build the systems and features that power Acorns’ organic growth engine: social graphs, engagement loops, referral mechanics, real-time interactions, sharing flows, and the infrastructure that makes a product spread. You’ll own your features end-to-end—API design, server logic, implementation, instrumentation, and iteration—and work directly with the CEO, a Senior Product Manager, and a Senior Product Designer. This is end-to-end ownership from early concept through shipped product on features that will reach millions of first-time investors.

Responsibilities

• Build the mechanics that make a product spread, including referral systems, social sharing flows, engagement loops, and real-time features that drive Acorns’ organic growth.
• Own features end-to-end from data model to shipped customer experience, across mobile and web, with full accountability for quality and performance in production.
• Deliver features across iOS, Android, Web, and backend services, moving fluidly between platforms depending on each initiative’s needs, and leveraging AI-assisted development tools to accelerate work in less-familiar codebases.
• Instrument your work properly: define the events, build the visibility, and use data to iterate fast.
• Take full ownership of the technical bar and architecture, upholding engineering standards where your decisions have outsized impact and every voice counts.
• Partner directly with the CEO, a Senior PM, and a Senior Designer in a tight, high-trust team that moves fast and ships things people actually use.

Qualifications

• Built social or engagement systems at scale with feeds, referral flows, notification infrastructure, social graphs, or real-time interactions at a gaming or consumer social company.
• Owned a feature end-to-end across the full stack: designed the data model, wrote the API, shipped the client, and monitored it in production.
• Shipped production features across more than one client platform (iOS, Android, or Web)—you have depth in at least one and have demonstrated you can build in the others with ramp-up time and modern tooling.
• Instrumented a growth or engagement feature with analytics events and used the data to drive meaningful iteration.
• Worked in a fast-moving, low-process environment where you drove your own work without waiting to be told what to build next.
• Used AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Copilot, or similar code-generation tools) as genuine accelerators—you see them as force multipliers and have a clear point of view on how to use them well.
• Written production code or had exposure in two or more of the following technologies: Swift, Kotlin, React Native, TypeScript, Dart, or Python that served millions of users.
• Built something—a side project, an open-source tool, a game mechanic—because you wanted to, not because someone asked you to.

About Acorns

Acorns is a financial wellness app that helps everyday people and families save and invest money for the long term. Since 2014, Acorns has grown into a global company with multiple life-stage products serving the needs of kids, teens, adults, and parents. Named one of Time’s “World’s Best Brands of 2024,” Acorns has helped over 14 million people save and invest over $25 billion, much of it from spare change and small amounts.

Pay

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $174,800 and $205,700/year plus variable compensation. Base pay may vary depending on market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include equity grants and discretionary cash bonus awards.

Benefits

• Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, including 401(k) eligibility.
• Various paid time off benefits, such as vacation, sick time, and parental leave.