Sr Staff Engineer Backend

The Sr Staff Engineer, Backend will architect and lead the distributed systems that power our lending operating system. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep systems design, complex business logic, and the realities of operating mission-critical services in a regulated industry.

You will drive architectural decisions across our multi-tenant, microservices-based platform - the systems that run the full loan lifecycle from origination and credit decisioning through contract execution, boarding, and servicing. You will set the technical direction for backend engineering, mentor and grow a team of engineers, and partner closely with frontend, product, QA, credit, and data teams to ship integrated, production-grade solutions that make capital move for small businesses.

Lendistry: Who We Are

We're proud to be the nation's largest minority-led, tech-savvy lender for small businesses and commercial real estate. As a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and Community Development Entity (CDE), our mission is all about creating economic opportunities and fueling growth for small business owners and their communities. Join us as we pave the way with innovative financing and financial education!

What You'll Be Doing

You will be the principal architect of the backend systems that power Lendistry's lending platform, including:

• Core lending services - origination, application intake, decisioning orchestration, contract execution, boarding, and servicing handoff.

• Credit and risk infrastructure - the services that orchestrate underwriting workflows, external data providers, and internal scoring models.

• Platform primitives - multi-tenant identity, authorization, audit logging, workflow orchestration, and the shared APIs every product team consumes.

• Integration fabric - credit bureaus, KYC/KYB providers, bank cores, servicers, payment rails, and government program systems.

• Operational backbone - observability, resilience patterns, and the on-call and release discipline that let a small team safely run big systems.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own the backend architecture of Lendistry's lending platform - service decomposition, domain boundaries, data ownership, inter-service communication, and the long-term evolution of the system.

• Set the technical direction and best practices for backend engineering - API design, language and framework choices, testing strategy, observability, and operational standards.

• Influence the product and platform roadmap across multiple services and integrations, representing backend engineering strategy at the organizational level.

• Drive cross-functional initiatives that span backend, frontend, data, credit, and compliance - the work that does not fit neatly inside one team.

Distributed Systems & Platform Development

• Design and build complex, scalable backend services in a microservices environment - production code that is high-quality, maintainable, performant, and safe to operate.

• Design and implement RESTful APIs and service-to-service integrations, event-driven workflows, and asynchronous processing pipelines for long-running lending operations.

• Own the core platform primitives - multi-tenancy and tenant-aware routing, authentication and authorization, caching, workflow orchestration, and shared infrastructure modules that every product team builds on.

• Translate complex business and compliance requirements - underwriting policy, SBA program rules, state lending regulations, investor and servicer contracts - into robust, secure, and auditable backend solutions.

• Design for data integrity and auditability - every state change in a loan must be traceable, reconcilable, and explainable to auditors, regulators, and partners.

Performance, Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Diagnose and prevent performance, scalability, and reliability issues in production - database hotspots, N+1 queries, unbounded queues, retry storms, and the long tail of distributed-systems failure modes.

• Advocate for and implement observability - structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, meaningful alerting, and the runbooks that make on-call humane.

• Harden security at the service layer - authentication, authorization, input validation, secret management, and defense-in-depth for services handling PII and financial data.

• Own the SDLC - CI/CD, automated testing, code review, and release practices that let the team ship confidently and often.

Mentorship & Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and coach backend engineers through architecture reviews, design docs, code reviews, and pairing - elevating the craft of everyone around you.

• Collaborate closely with product and business partners, frontend engineers, QA, credit, and data teams to deliver integrated solutions rather than isolated services.

• Raise the bar for engineering standards - what good looks like, how we design, how we review, how we operate.

Innovation & Future-Proofing

• Stay current with emerging backend, cloud, and distributed systems technologies and assess honestly what is worth adopting versus what is hype.

• Research and pilot new tools and patterns to improve developer velocity, platform reliability, and product capability - including the integration of AI tools into backend workflows.

• Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence, continuous learning, and disciplined collaboration.

AI-Assisted Development Practice

Lendistry engineers are expected to be among the most effective users of AI tools in the company. This is not optional and it is not decoration - it is how we ship.

• Daily use of AI coding assistants - Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalents - as a standard part of the development loop for code generation, refactoring, testing, documentation, and review.

• Clear judgment about when to trust, verify, or override AI-generated suggestions, particularly in security-sensitive and business-critical contexts.

• Leadership in evaluating and adopting emerging agentic development tools, and in sharing learnings across Lendistry engineering.

• Familiarity with agentic AI development concepts - multi-step task automation, LLM tool use, prompt engineering for code generation, and the integration of AI agents into engineering workflows.

Your Areas of Knowledge and Expertise

• Builder mentality. Bias toward shipping production systems; opinionated about architecture, pragmatic about tradeoffs.

• Ownership. Takes systems from concept through production, operates what you build, and owns the outcome.

• Communication. Writes clearly, argues precisely, and can explain complex backend systems to executives, credit leaders, and non-technical stakeholders.

• Leadership presence. Inspires confidence and drives consensus across teams without relying on formal authority.

• Mentorship. Elevates the engineers around you through reviews, pairing, and durable technical culture.

• Comfort with ambiguity. Thrives in a fast-paced, evolving environment where priorities shift and requirements sharpen over time.

Do you have experience in gRPC?, Do you have a Bachelor's degree?, * 7+ years as a software engineer building complex, scalable backend and distributed systems - preferably in multi-tenant SaaS or regulated industries.

• Strong proficiency in one or more statically typed or JVM-based languages (Java, Kotlin, Scala, Go, C#, or TypeScript on a type-safe stack), with deep expertise in object-oriented and functional design patterns.

• Thorough understanding of modern enterprise web frameworks and their core principles - dependency injection, transactions, middleware, and asynchronous processing.

• Proven microservices experience - service decomposition, inter-service communication, contract design, and the operational discipline that distributed systems demand.

• Deep expertise with relational databases - schema design, query optimization, indexing, transactions, and data migration strategies at scale.

• Experience with multi-tenant system design - data isolation, tenant-aware routing, and per-tenant configuration management.

Platform & Integration Skills

• RESTful API design and implementation at expert level; familiarity with gRPC and event-driven alternatives for internal communication.

• Modern authentication and authorization - JWT, OAuth2/OIDC, session management, and fine-grained access control.

• Asynchronous and event-driven processing - message queues, task scheduling, workflow orchestration, and idempotency.

• Caching strategies at both application and data tiers, with a clear-eyed understanding of invalidation, staleness, and coherence tradeoffs.

• Cloud platform expertise on AWS (or equivalent) - IAM, networking, containers, serverless, and cost-aware operation of large-scale production cloud services.

• Observability in practice - logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and the habits that turn incidents into improvements.

Judgment & Craft

• Ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions - especially the complex, edge-case-heavy business rules that define lending.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and a pragmatic approach to technical decision-making, balancing engineering ideals with business reality.

• Demonstrated hands-on experience with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini Code Assist, Cursor, or similar) in a professional or enterprise setting.

Preferred Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.

• Experience in fintech, lending, banking, or another regulated industry, with working knowledge of compliance, audit, and data-handling obligations.

• Experience integrating with loan origination systems, loan servicing platforms, credit bureaus, or core banking systems.

• Background with event-sourced or domain-driven architectures applied to long-running, auditable business processes.

• Experience operating platforms that must meet SOC 2, GLBA, or similar controls., This is a stationary position that requires frequent sitting (approximately 95%), repetitive wrist motions, grasping, speaking, listening, close vision, and the ability to adjust focus. It also may require occasional standing, lifting, carrying of 20lbs or less, walking, kneeling, bending/stooping, twisting, pulling/pushing, and reaching above the shoulder. Employees in this position must be physically able to efficiently perform the essential functions of the position.

Pulled from the full job description

• Pet insurance

• Health insurance

• 401(k) matching

• Paid time off

• Vision insurance

• Health savings account

• Dental insurance, Why You'll Love Working Here:

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance

• Generous Paid Time Off

• Birthday Day Off

• 12 Paid Company Holidays

• 401(k) Match

• FSA and HSA

• Paid Life Insurance

• Paid Disability Insurance

• Pet Insurance

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

• Professional Development Courses

• In Office Provided Snacks and Drinks

• Gym Facilities (LA & Tustin/CEC Offices)

• In Office Engagement Activities

Compensation Range

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $99,100 - $185,000 annually.

Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location.

The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum base salary for new hires for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by multiple factors like job-related skills, experience, and state of residence. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range during the interview process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include any variable compensation elements.