Senior Software Engineer, Marketplace Optimization

About the role

The Team: Marketplace Optimization builds the intelligent systems that power Upstart's AI lending marketplace. Our teams make real-time decisions about how borrowers are matched with capital, how offers are constructed, and how the marketplace evolves through experimentation. We solve complex optimization problems at scale, balancing borrower experience, investor objectives, profitability, and operational efficiency while operating some of the most critical services at Upstart.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly available backend services that power Upstart's real-time lending marketplace.
• Develop scalable systems that enable rapid experimentation while maintaining the reliability of business-critical production services.
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Capital Markets, and Analytics to translate complex business problems into elegant technical solutions.
• Build flexible platform capabilities that enable new marketplace optimization and monetization strategies.
• Improve the scalability, observability, and operational excellence of systems responsible for real-time marketplace decisions.
• Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, testing, and operational ownership of critical production systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems
• Experience developing production services using one or more of Ruby on Rails, Python, or Kotlin
• Experience designing APIs and building scalable distributed systems
• Experience operating business-critical production services with an emphasis on reliability, monitoring, testing, and operational excellence
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and modern cloud-native application development
• Experience collaborating across engineering, product, and business stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building marketplaces, recommendation systems, optimization engines, financial systems
• Experience with event-driven architectures, Kafka, workflow orchestration, or real-time data processing
• Experience partnering with Machine Learning or Data Science teams
• Experience improving platform scalability and evolving distributed system architecture
• Interest in solving complex optimization problems that combine technical and business tradeoffs