Staff Platform Engineer

Quanta

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 200,000 - 280,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive early-stage salary

Competitive early-stage equity

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401(k)

Take-what-you-need paid vacation

Commuter benefits

Wellness stipend

Paid lunches and dinners in the office

All the equipment and tools you need

Job summary

Quanta is building a new system of record for finance, the Operational Ledger, with granular financial data and safe, actionable primitives. We're a small, in-person team in downtown San Francisco, tackling complex backend and distributed systems to support growth and accuracy.

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll own foundational systems, drive architecture, reliability, and developer leverage, and collaborate across product and engineering to deliver durable, trustworthy financial

Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and owning complex backend, platform, or distributed systems in production.
Deep backend and distributed systems experience, with emphasis on correctness, reliability, and data integrity.
Strong systems thinking, including API design, data modeling, system boundaries, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
Excellent technical judgment and the ability to distinguish between durable infrastructure and simple solutions.
Strong debugging instincts across application, data, and infrastructure layers.
Ability to create clarity from ambiguity and identify high-leverage technical problems to solve.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, especially translating complex tradeoffs for engineers and non-engineers.
Hands-on mindset: you want to design, build, and operate systems.

Skills

10+ years of software engineering

Deep backend and distributed systems

Strong systems thinking

Excellent technical judgment

Strong debugging instincts

Clarity from ambiguity

Strong communication & collaboration

Hands-on mindset

Job description

We're building a new system of record for finance, one that understands not just the numbers, but the business context behind them. At its core is our Operational Ledger: a financial data layer that preserves every event, calculation, policy, source, and decision behind the financials, rather than reducing them to contextless entries.

Questions that once took weeks to answer become as routine as a Google search: Why did margins change? Which customers are actually profitable? How are we tracking against budget? We're not bolting AI onto legacy software. Quanta was built from the ground up around granular financial data, flexible primitives, and systems that agents can safely understand and act on.

We've spent years closing the books for real, fast-growing companies and turning what we learn into product. We've already replaced much of what QuickBooks and NetSuite can do and the manual work surrounding them. Customers are now turning off legacy accounting systems and moving to Quanta.

We're still early. The problems are hard, the ambition is enormous, and there's no playbook for what we're building.

The Team

We're a small, tight-knit team working together in person in downtown San Francisco. Our team brings together deep expertise in engineering and finance. We've built accounting systems at affirm, ledgers at stripe and robinhood, launched products from 0→1, scaled infrastructure processing billions of dollars, built finance functions, and closed the books under real operating pressure.

We understand our customers because we have been in their shoes. Quanta's earliest product was built around a few principles we still value: get to learning as quickly as possible, find the simplest solution that works, and build alongside real users and real-world edge cases.

Quanta is for people who want ownership, prioritize learning and outcomes over conventional playbooks, and are comfortable figuring things out as they go. We move quickly, but we are building systems where correctness and trust matter deeply. That tension—moving fast while building durable foundations—is at the heart of the engineering problems we work on.

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll work on the foundational systems that Quanta's product and engineering teams build on top of. You'll own problems where architecture, correctness, reliability, and developer leverage matter—and where the right abstraction can unlock an entire category of product capabilities.

You'll operate across team boundaries, identifying the technical investments that matter most and driving them from ambiguous problem to production.

What We’re Looking For

10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and owning complex backend, platform, or distributed systems in production.
Deep backend and distributed systems experience, particularly with systems where correctness, reliability, and data integrity matter.
Strong systems thinking, including API design, data modeling, system boundaries, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
Excellent technical judgment and the ability to distinguish between problems that require durable infrastructure and those where the simplest solution is the right one.
Strong debugging instincts and comfort working through difficult problems across application, data, and infrastructure layers.
Ability to create clarity from ambiguity and independently identify the highest-leverage technical problems to solve.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, particularly when translating complex technical tradeoffs for engineers and non-engineers.
A hands-on mindset. You want to design systems and build them.

Bonus points for experience with financial systems, ledgers, accounting infrastructure, data platforms, developer platforms, or other systems where correctness and auditability are critical. You are excited about working in person with a collaborative team in San Francisco.

This Role Is Not for You If…

You want a Staff role primarily focused on architecture, planning, or technical strategy rather than writing and operating production code.
You prefer clearly defined problems and established technical roadmaps rather than identifying what needs to be built.
You reach for sophisticated abstractions before understanding the underlying problem. We value durable systems, but we also value simplicity.
You optimize for speed by accepting known gaps in correctness or reliability. Trust matters deeply in the systems we build.
You are uncomfortable working in a complex, judgment-heavy domain where the right technical model requires understanding the underlying business context.
You think of platform engineering primarily as infrastructure or developer tooling. Our platform sits directly underneath the product and the financial systems our customers rely on.
You are primarily interested in AI as a standalone feature rather than building the systems, constraints, and primitives that make AI useful and trustworthy.
You prefer working independently or remotely from product engineers and domain experts. This team works closely and in person by design.

Why Quanta

Build a category, not just features. We're not selling a slightly better version of an established tool. We're changing what companies should expect from their financial systems.

Join early enough to matter. We're a small team. The things you discover, build, and prove can become part of how Quanta sells for years.

Learn directly from exceptional people. You'll work alongside founders, engineers, and finance leaders who have built financial infrastructure and operated finance functions firsthand.

Grow with the company. We're looking for someone who wants to master outbound, take on increasing ownership, and help us build the sales organization that comes next.

Benefits