Sr. Backend Engineer, Product

Pinwheel; New York (NY); On-site; USD 160,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Great compensation & equity packages

Full medical, dental, and vision

Life & short-term disability insurance

Flexible PTO policy

Paid parental leave

401K for retirement planning

Free Citibike membership

Pet friendly offices and Zoom spaces

Job summary

Pinwheel is hiring a senior backend-leaning Product Engineer to join our Product Engineering team in NYC. You’ll build APIs, SDKs, and dashboards that power customer experiences for leading brands. You'll own data models, backend services, and tooling while collaborating with product and other engineers.

Hybrid work with 3 days in NYC; compensation includes salary, equity and benefits. You’ll mentor engineers and help the team scale, with a focus on reliability, performance, and security as we

Qualifications

• 5+ years building back-end or full-stack apps with APIs.
• Experience at early-stage startups or small tech companies.
• Deep expertise in modern back-end languages/frameworks.
• Experience with React or Vue on the frontend.

Responsibilities

• Understand customer needs and design scalable systems.
• Build and evolve data models, services, and APIs.
• Design and ship backend features with measurable impact.
• Maintain the Python-based microservice stack.
• Mentor engineers and raise the team’s skills.

Skills

API design

Data modeling

Backend dev

Team collaboration

Customer focus

Mentoring

Startup experience

Tools

FastAPI

Django

Rails

Gin

Job description

Pinwheel - Building the future of financial services in partnership with the biggest brands

“I love my banking app!” said no one, ever.

Pinwheel is on a mission to change that. We believe banks and financial service providers represent the greatest opportunity to build 10x better experiences, especially in the AI age. We’re building the next generation of financial products alongside some of the biggest names in the market including Robinhood, DoorDash, Chime, Cash App, Credit Karma, American Express, Discover, Intuit, Acorns, Visa and more.

If you’re excited by the idea of having your work touch and impact the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers, Pinwheel is the place for you.

If you get stoked about building products alongside the biggest brands in the world, Pinwheel is the place for you.

If you want to join a scrappy, hustling team that is obsessed with defining the future of financial services, Pinwheel is the place for you!

Pinwheel has raised $77M from top-tier investors such as Coatue, Notable, First Round, Upfront, Primary, American Express, Franklin Templeton, Indeed, Semper Virens and more.

**This role is hybrid with 3 days a week in our NYC office.

**This position does not offer visa sponsorship now or in the future.**

Who are we looking for?

We’re hiring a senior backend-leaning Product Engineer for our Product Engineering team. The PE team builds all the things our customers and their users use: public APIs, embedded SDKs, customer management dashboard, and more.

Our Product Engineering team is lean and works very closely with Product to ensure we’re evolving Pinwheel’s product in ways that bring maximum value to our customers. We are a high-velocity team where we balance four main workstreams: support of customers, deliver the roadmap, proactively improve the product and keep-the-lights-on.

What will you do?

Here are some projects you might work on in your first six months:

• Help us build our Bill Switch product that helps our customers drive account primacy through migrating their users’ subscription spend to their new accounts
• Contribute to a new API version that improves our contracts and formalizes recent product direction in our platform’s code
• Help us firm up and improve our tax product for next tax season
• Clean up old code that no longer serves our current product direction and leave the codebase better than you found it
• Build a new customer dashboard API that aligns with our stack and opens up future expansion possibilities in customer dashboard functionality
• Build new integrations with banking platform partners and help us improve existing implementations to make them more effective

In general, your responsibilities in this role would include:

• Deeply understand our customer needs and design systems to solve them
• Build, scale, and evolve the data models, services, and systems that power our APIs
• Design and ship impactful new functionality in our products, especially focused on our internal and customer-facing back-end APIs
• Maintain and improve our Python-based microservice stack
• Create and improve tooling, processes, and engineering standards across the team
• Mentor engineers and help the team grow

What qualifications are we looking for?

• 5+ years of experience building and maintaining back-end or full-stack applications, specifically with data modeling, application logic, and API design
• Prior experience working at an early-stage startup or small tech company
• Deep expertise with modern back-end languages/frameworks (e.g. FastAPI, Django, Rails, Gin)
• Working experience with modern frontend web frameworks (React, Vue, etc.)
• Played key implementation roles in projects with multiple teams and engineers
• Excited by working closely with customers
• Responsibly uses AI on top of fundamental skills, doesn’t replace them
• Maintains a high bar for technical quality and continues to level up

At Pinwheel, total compensation is made up of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they can bring to the organization in delivering outsized results. The talent market is competitive, and maintaining our ability to recruit and retain the best team possible is a top priority for Pinwheel. When creating an offer, we consider interview performance, candidate experience, external market competitiveness, and internal equity in thoughtfully assessing compensation. The expected cash salary range for this role is $160,000 - $200,000 base.

Why join Pinwheel?

Best time to join- Our company is small but well-funded, meaning you are joining at a time where you can impact and shape the company.

Be a cultural builder- You will have an active hand in molding the company culture and being a part of the entrepreneurial journey.

Build something revolutionary- Help build the products on the bleeding edge of financial services!

Benefits included:

• Great compensation & equity packages
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Flexible PTO policy that prioritizes recharge and balance
• Paid parental leave
• 401K for retirement planning
• Free Citibike membership
• Pet friendly offices and Zoom spaces

Diversity & Inclusion at Pinwheel

At Pinwheel, we are committed to building an environment that is diverse and inclusive. We believe that having people across different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives enables us not only to build the best financial products, but to help us realize the best versions of ourselves. Pinwheel is an equal opportunity employer, and we aim to be an open and supportive place to work.