Staff Software Engineer

Lower; Columbus, Northern (OH, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision

Parental leave

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Paid holidays and PTO

401K with company match

Mortgage refinance/purchase discount

Job summary

Lower is building technology that powers digital mortgage, home finance, automation, and AI-powered experiences across the homeownership journey.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of core services, systems, and architectural patterns across Lower’s engineering organization. You’ll mentor engineers, drive high-impact technical initiatives, and help scale platforms to improve developer and customer experiences.

Qualifications

• Full-stack expertise with proven ability to deliver high-quality backend and frontend solutions.
• Strong in system design and architecture with multi-team influence.
• Experience with modern frontend and backend tech stacks and cloud platforms.
• Proficiency in AI-assisted software development tools for productivity and quality.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across stakeholders and teams.
• Prior fintech, lending, or consumer financial products experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems across Lower’s engineering organization.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers and promote engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with product and business leaders to translate strategy into scalable technical solutions.
• Drive architectural decisions balancing performance, cost, and long-term scalability.
• Own technical program delivery from architecture through deployment and documentation.

Skills

Full-stack expertise

System design

Mentoring

Cross-functional leadership

Code review & quality

Performance optimization

AI-assisted development tools

Tools

TypeScript

React

AWS

Next.js

Node.js

C#/.NET

Go

Postgres

Cursor

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

We believe homeownership is one of the most powerful ways people can build long-term wealth. Our mission at Lower is to make that path simpler, more accessible, and more connected.

We’re building a one-stop shop homeownership platform that brings together real estate, mortgage lending, technology, and local expertise. Through Lower’s direct-to-consumer lending business, our nationwide retail branches, and our real estate platform Movoto, we meet people wherever they are in the homeownership journey.

We innovate through technology, but human expertise is what sets us apart. Our approach combines a seamless online experience with experienced people. Whether someone wants to handle most of the process online or work directly with a local loan officer or real estate agent, we’re building a platform that gives them the tools, expertise, and support to move forward with confidence.

Job Description:

Lower is building technology that powers digital mortgage, home finance, automation, and AI-powered experiences across the homeownership journey.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of core services, systems, and architectural patterns across Lower’s engineering organization. You’ll operate as a technical leader across teams, helping scale our platforms, mentor engineers, and drive high-impact technical initiatives that improve both developer effectiveness and customer experience.

This is an opportunity to join a fintech company redefining the mortgage industry by combining data-driven insights with thoughtful user experiences. You’ll work on impactful projects, collaborate with a talented team, and help us build scalable systems that directly improve how people achieve one of life’s biggest milestones—owning a home.

Work Location

Hybrid in either Columbus, OH (preferred); Austin, TX

Work Type:

Full-time W2 employment, visa sponsorship is not available for this position at this time.

What you’ll do:

Technical Skills

• System design & architecture: Lead the design and evolution of scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems, driving architectural decisions across teams while balancing performance, cost, complexity, and long-term platform scalability.
• Code quality & testing: Strong in unit, integration, end-to-end testing, and test automation frameworks.
• Performance optimization: Proficiency in profiling, debugging, and optimizing application performance.
• DevOps & CI/CD: Experience with deployment pipelines, monitoring, observability, and release management.
• Security awareness: Knowledge of secure coding practices, threat modeling, and compliance requirements.
• Data & APIs: Comfortable designing and consuming APIs, working with databases, and handling data modeling.
• Tooling, automation & AI-assisted development: Skilled at improving developer workflows through automation (build systems, config management, test infrastructure) and modern AI-assisted engineering tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar technologies to accelerate development, debugging, testing, and documentation workflows.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Stakeholder communication: Partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to translate strategic business initiatives into scalable technical solutions, clearly communicating tradeoffs, risks, and long-term architectural considerations.
• Mentorship: Coach junior and mid-level engineers, providing guidance on coding practices, system design, and career development.
• Code review: Promote best practices in readability, maintainability, and scalability through constructive code reviews, providing guidance and support.
• Engineering influence: Lead through technical influence, mentorship, and collaboration rather than direct authority, helping elevate engineering quality and decision‑making across the organization.
• Cross-functional technical leadership: Drive alignment and technical execution across multiple engineering teams, fostering collaboration, reducing organizational friction, and promoting shared engineering standards and best practices.

Project & Execution

• Technical program ownership: Lead large, ambiguous, or cross-functional technical initiatives from architecture through delivery, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability across systems and teams.
• Risk management: Identify risks early (technical debt, bottlenecks, scalability limits) and propose mitigations.
• Tradeoff negotiation: Weigh cost, scalability, and performance when evaluating solutions and clearly explain reasoning.
• Documentation: Produce and maintain high‑quality technical documentation for systems, processes, and decisions.
• Organizational unblocker: Proactively identify and resolve technical, operational, or coordination roadblocks impacting engineering teams, improving delivery velocity and cross‑team effectiveness.
• Continuous improvement: Identify systemic engineering bottlenecks, operational inefficiencies, and architectural gaps, driving initiatives that improve developer productivity, platform reliability, and organizational scalability.

Strategic Impact

• Technical vision: Influence long‑term technical direction, helping shape architecture and tech stack decisions.
• Technical leadership across teams: Serve as a technical leader across multiple engineering teams, helping establish architectural patterns, engineering standards, and shared platform direction.
• Innovation: Proactively identify opportunities for new technologies, frameworks, or approaches that benefit the business.
• Quality bar setting: Advocate for engineering excellence, ensuring the team balances speed with maintainability.
• Institutional knowledge & platform stewardship: Develop deep expertise in Lower’s systems, infrastructure, and domain workflows, helping teams navigate technical complexity and make informed architectural decisions.

Who you are:

• Full-stack expertise with proven ability to deliver high-quality backend and front‑end solutions.
• Problem solver and innovator, with a track record of implementing new ideas and tackling complex technical challenges in design and architecture.
• Proficiency in our stack— TypeScript, React, AWS, Next.js, Node.js, C#/.NET, Go and Postgres —or the ability to quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and tools.
• Experience leveraging AI-assisted software development tools (such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, debugging, testing, and developer efficiency.
• Strong computer science foundations, including algorithms, data structures, concurrency, parallelism, asynchronous programming, networking, and system design.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams, lead architectural initiatives, and operate effectively in ambiguous or rapidly evolving environments.
• Strong track record of mentoring engineers, **scaling engineering best practices, and improving technical decision‑**making within growing organizations.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills—someone who brings strong opinions held loosely, engages debate without ego, gives and receives feedback constructively, and helps foster a supportive engineering culture. We're looking for someone people want to design alongside.
• Prior experience in fintech, lending, or consumer financial products is a plus, but not required.

What you'll get:

• Extended benefit offerings including medical/dental/vision, parental leave, life insurance, short- and long-term disability
• Paid holidays and paid time off
• 401K with company match
• Discount on home mortgage refinances or purchase

Lower provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.