Remote Backend Engineer, Marketplace Optimization

Upstart; United States; Remote; USD 142,000 - 197,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual equity grants

401k with company match

ESPP

Health coverage

HSA

Paid time off

Parental leave

EAP

Wellness allowance

Productivity allowance

Onsite lunches

Job summary

Upstart is seeking a Software Engineer II to design and build scalable backend systems powering real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, and monetization. This role emphasizes reliability, observability, and collaboration with Product, ML, and Data teams. Base salary varies by location, with strong growth opportunities.

The position offers remote work from the United States or Canada, with regular in-person onsite opportunities in select cities and a digital-first, flexible work culture.

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 testing, monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Experience designing production systems where reliability, availability, observability, and correctness are critical.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend systems that power real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, offer selection, and monetization.
• Build flexible platform capabilities for experimentation with allocation strategies, marketplace economics, and new monetization approaches.
• Develop reliable, observable services balancing availability, latency, and correctness across distributed systems.
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Pricing Engineering, Data Science, Capital Markets, and Lending Partnerships to translate needs into solutions.
• Make architectural decisions to simplify systems and create reusable capabilities for future marketplace innovation.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Production services

Testing & monitoring

Reliability

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Python

Kotlin

Job description

Upstart is seeking a Software Engineer II to design and build scalable backend systems powering real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, and monetization. This role emphasizes reliability, observability, and collaboration with Product, ML, and Data teams. Base salary varies by location, with strong growth opportunities.

The position offers remote work from the United States or Canada, with regular in-person onsite opportunities in select cities and a digital-first, flexible work culture.