Founding Engineer

Ficus Platforms; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Ficus Platforms seeks a Founding Engineer to help build the company from the ground up. You will work directly with the founders on the earliest version of the product: architecting the platform, building customer-facing workflows, designing secure backend systems, integrating with banks and insurers, and helping define the technical culture of the company.

This is not a narrow role; you will own ambiguous problems end-to-end, talk to users and enterprise customers, make product decisions, ship

Qualifications

• Strong full-stack engineering experience with ownership across frontend, backend, and data models.
• Experience building production systems in fintech or regulated environments.
• Deep focus on security, reliability, and compliance in money-related workflows.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with founders, customers and vendors.

Responsibilities

• Build the core platform from ground up, architecting services and workflows.
• Design secure, scalable backend systems for regulated financial workflows (identity, money movement, audit trails).
• Integrate with partner banks, insurers, payment processors and card programs.
• Create intuitive user experiences for beneficiaries and enterprise users.
• Develop internal tools to support operations, compliance and partner management.
• Establish engineering practices around security, testing, observability, and access control.
• Engage in customer conversations to translate real-world needs into product features.
• Make foundational architectural decisions that scale with the company.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Security mindset

Ownership mindset

Communication

Fintech experience

Bank integrations

Job description

About Ficus

Ficus is building modern payout infrastructure for life insurance carriers.

Today, when someone loses a loved one, the financial experience that follows is often slow, confusing, and outdated. Beneficiaries may receive paper checks, unclear instructions, fragmented communications, and limited flexibility in how they access funds. Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with legacy banking integrations, manual workflows, compliance constraints, and outdated retained asset account infrastructure.

We are building the platform that helps insurers deliver a dramatically better beneficiary payout experience — including retained asset accounts, debit card access, checks, digital onboarding, beneficiary communications, and modern money movement through partner banks.

This is a large, overlooked, regulated market with real customer pain, real enterprise demand, and the opportunity to become core infrastructure for how insurance benefits are paid out.

We have raised from Founder Collective and BTV, and have signed a contract with one of the largest life insurance carriers in the United States. We are looking for highly driven, AI-pilled engineers to join us on this mission and be a core part of our founding team.

Our Team

Daniel Nissenbaum (CEO): Daniel was previously co-founder and CTO of Alinea, a Series A consumer investing app for Gen Z, which he helped scale to over 2M+ users and a $20M run rate. Before Alinea, he was a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase.

Terry Angelos (Co-founder): Terry is a lifelong fintech entrepreneur. He founded Trialpay which was acquired by Visa. He then stayed on to lead Visa’s strategy across fintech partnerships and digital assets as the Head of Fintech and Crypto. Terry was also formerly CEO of DriveWealth, a Series D brokerage infrastructure platform powering investing experiences for fintechs around the world.

About the Role

We are hiring a Founding Engineer to help build Ficus from the ground up. You will work directly with the founders on the earliest version of the product: architecting the platform, building customer-facing workflows, designing secure backend systems, integrating with banks and insurers, and helping define the technical culture of the company.

This is not a narrowly scoped engineering role. You will be one of the first technical hires at the company, with meaningful ownership over both the product and the engineering foundation. You should be excited to own ambiguous problems end-to-end, talk to users and enterprise customers, make product decisions, ship quickly, and build systems that can eventually pass the scrutiny of insurers, banks, auditors, and security teams.

What You’ll Do

• Build the core Ficus platform from zero to one, including beneficiary onboarding, account flows, payout experiences, internal admin tools, and insurer-facing workflows.

• Design and implement secure, reliable backend systems for regulated financial workflows, including identity, account state, money movement, audit trails, permissions, and operational controls.

• Work on integrations with partner banks, insurers, payment processors, card programs, check issuance providers, and other financial infrastructure partners.

• Create polished, intuitive user experiences for beneficiaries navigating emotionally sensitive, high-stakes financial moments.

• Build internal tools that help operations, customer support, compliance, and insurer partners manage payout workflows with clarity and confidence.

• Help establish engineering practices around security, testing, observability, data modeling, access control, infrastructure, and compliance readiness.

• Join customer calls, understand insurer and beneficiary pain points, and translate messy real-world workflows into simple product experiences.

• Make foundational architecture decisions that will matter as the company scales.

What We’re Looking For

• You are an AI-pilled, product-minded engineer who likes owning problems, not tickets.

• You have strong full-stack engineering experience and can move comfortably across frontend, backend, infrastructure, APIs, and data models.

• You have built production systems before and understand the tradeoffs between shipping quickly and building durable foundations.

• You care about security, reliability, and correctness, especially in workflows involving money, identity, personally identifiable information, or regulated customers.

• You are comfortable with ambiguity. You can take a vague customer problem, ask the right questions, scope the first version, and ship.

• You write clean, pragmatic code and have strong judgment about when to move fast versus when to slow down.

• You communicate clearly and can work directly with founders, customers, vendors, and non-technical stakeholders.

• You want to be early. You are motivated by ownership, pace, and the chance to help define a company from the beginning.

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, insurance, banking, payments, card issuing, lending, brokerage, payroll, benefits, or other regulated financial products.

• Experience with bank integrations, payment rails, ledgering, KYC/KYB, money movement, card issuing, ACH, wires, checks, or reconciliation.

• Experience building enterprise software where security reviews, SOC 2, auditability, permissions, and compliance matter.

• Experience with AWS, infrastructure-as-code, observability, secure cloud architecture, and production operations.

Why Join

Ficus is taking on a $30B legacy monopoly in one of the most overlooked corners of financial infrastructure: how life insurance benefits are paid out.

This is a massive, under-modernized market with real enterprise demand, entrenched incumbents, and a clear opportunity to build a category-defining company. The work is both technically deep and deeply human: modernizing the infrastructure behind one of the most important financial moments in a person’s life.

You’ll be joining a seasoned fintech founding team with the scar tissue to know what matters: how to ship quickly, sell into regulated enterprises, navigate financial infrastructure, and build products people actually trust.

As one of the first engineers, you’ll have real ownership from day one across product, architecture, customer implementation, engineering culture, and hiring. And if you have aspirations to be a fintech founder one day, this is the kind of role where you will get a front-row seat to the full company-building journey: from product and infrastructure to enterprise sales, compliance, partnerships, and go-to-market.

You will not just be building features — you will be helping define the foundation of the company