Software Engineer II, Marketplace Optimzation

About the role

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. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress. We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City (opening Summer 2026), you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you. If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.

The Team: Upstart’s Marketplace Optimization team is part of Capital Marketplace Engineering and is responsible for optimizing Upstart’s two-sided capital marketplace. Across Matching & Offer Selection and Monetization, the team builds the real-time decisioning systems, experimentation capabilities, and marketplace services that help match borrowers with sources of capital while improving marketplace efficiency, investor utilization, and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend systems that power real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, offer selection, and monetization.
• Build flexible platform capabilities that enable experimentation with allocation strategies, marketplace economics, and new monetization approaches while maintaining reliability and scalability.
• Develop reliable, observable services that balance availability, latency, correctness, and operational simplicity across complex distributed systems.
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Pricing Engineering, Data Science, Capital Markets, and Lending Partnerships to translate marketplace needs into effective technical solutions.
• Make architectural decisions that simplify systems, reduce coupling across marketplace and adjacent platforms, and create reusable capabilities that support future marketplace innovation.
• Use Generative AI tools thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and learning while maintaining ownership of technical decisions, security, code quality, and correctness.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) and 2 years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend or distributed systems in production.
• Experience developing production services using one or more modern backend programming languages.
• Experience building and operating business-critical systems with demonstrated use of testing, monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Experience designing production systems where reliability, availability, observability, and correctness are critical.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with marketplaces, financial systems, recommendation or matching engines, optimization systems, or experimentation platforms.
• Knowledge of low-latency, high-throughput distributed system design and architecture.
• Experience partnering with machine learning or data science teams to integrate models or data-driven decisioning into production systems.
• Experience with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, or Kotlin.
• Ability to navigate ambiguous technical and business problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and collaborate across engineering, product, and business teams.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including base pay, bonus opportunities, and annual equity grants that vest quarterly
• Retirement benefits to help you plan for the future, including a 401(k) or Group Retirement Savings Plan with a company match of $2 for every $1 contributed, up to $15,000 annually (USD in the US, CAD in Canada)
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with discounted stock purchase options for eligible employees (US only)
• Comprehensive health coverage designed to support you and your family, including medical, dental, vision, and wellness resources for US and supplemental health coverage for Canada
• Health Sav