Senior Backend Engineer

Slope; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Slope is building AI-native credit infrastructure for B2B commerce and seeks a senior backend engineer to own the backend systems powering embedded credit, payments, and underwriting.

You will design and implement production-grade services, improve data pipelines, and collaborate across teams to ship reliable, scalable solutions that impact underwriting decisions and customer experience.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience in fast-moving environments.
• Strong production backend experience with Node.js/TypeScript.
• Strong SQL skills; comfortable with relational databases, data warehouses, ETL pipelines and messy data.
• Experience designing APIs, services, jobs, data models and contracts used by other teams.
• Experience in payments infrastructure and credit-related systems.
• Track record of shipping reliable, high-uptime systems with clear ownership.
• High agency: ability to define and clarify problems with minimal direction.
• Strong written and verbal communication; ability to explain tradeoffs and failure modes.
• Product judgment: focusing on real user impact in underwriting workflows.
• Experience with AWS, Postgres, Snowflake; queues, async jobs; observability tools; and third-party financial APIs.
• Excitement around AI-native infrastructure and agentic workflows.
• Startup experience in a high-ownership environment is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build and own production systems for underwriting, bank-data review, credit review workflows, and portfolio monitoring.
• Create reusable infrastructure for evidence gathering, decisioning, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Develop internal tools for the credit risk team to review data, understand decisions, handle exceptions, and move faster without sacrificing correctness.
• Clearly communicate technical assumptions, tradeoffs, failure modes, system boundaries, and migration plans.
• Own ambiguous projects end-to-end: define the problem, propose a path, align across teams, ship production slices, measure, and iterate.
• Improve reliability, latency, and correctness of systems that directly affect credit decisions and customer experience.

Skills

Backend engineering

Node.js/TypeScript

SQL/Relational databases

APIs & services design

Payments infrastructure

Cloud/AWS

Data pipelines/ETL

Communication

AI-native infra

Startup experience

Tools

AWS

PostgreSQL

Snowflake

Queues/Async jobs

Observability tooling

Job description

About Slope

Slope builds AI-native credit infrastructure for B2B commerce. We help growing businesses access capital and help credit teams make faster, better, more automated decisions.

We are looking for a senior backend engineer to own the backend systems that make that possible.

The role

You will work on the backend systems that power Slope’s embedded credit, payments and underwriting.
You should be excited by messy, important problems. Your job is to turn ambiguous problems and improvements into reliable production systems.

What you’ll do

• Build and own production systems for underwriting, bank-data review, credit review workflows, portfolio monitoring.

• Create reusable infrastructure for evidence gathering, decisioning, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop review.

• Build internal tools that help the credit risk team review data, understand decisions, handle exceptions, and move faster without sacrificing correctness.

• Clearly communicate technical assumptions, tradeoffs, failure modes, system boundaries, and migration plans.

• Own ambiguous projects end-to-end: define the problem, propose a path, align across teams, ship production slices, measure, and iterate.

• Improve the reliability, latency, correctness of systems that directly affect credit decisions and customer experience.
  

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, preferably in a fast-moving environment.

• Strong production backend experience with Node.js/TypeScript.

• Strong SQL skills and comfort working with relational databases, data warehouses, ETL/data pipelines, and messy real-world data.

• Experience designing APIs, services, jobs, data models, and contracts that other teams depend on.

• Experience in payments infrastructure.

• A track record of shipping systems where correctness, reliability, and operational clarity matter.

• High agency and proactive: you do not need fully specified tickets, and you know how to create clarity when the problem is vague.

• Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain tradeoffs, and failure modes.

• Product judgment for internal users. You care whether the system actually improves underwriting decisions and workflows, not just whether the code shipped.

• Experience with AWS, Postgres, Snowflake, queues, async jobs, observability tooling, and third-party financial APIs.

• Excitement around building AI-native infrastructure and agentic workflows, both within the engineering team as well as broader credit and data science teams.

• Excited to experiment with AI tools.

• Strong plus: Startup experience, especially in a high-ownership environment.
  

Why Slope

• You will work on the core systems that determine how Slope understands risk, extends capital, and helps businesses grow.

• You will have high ownership: small team, important surface area, real production impact.

• You will report to the CEO and work on mission-critical projects.

• You will help build the operating system for B2B credit: faster decisions, better workflows, stronger feedback loops, and scalable infrastructure.
  

Slope is backed by top investors including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, and leading founders/operators across fintech and technology.

Other

Location: San Francisco preferred. Exceptional remote candidates in compatible time zones considered.

Level: Senior IC.