Staff Software Engineer - Payments & Ledger

Praxis, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Take Command is seeking a Staff Engineer to own ledger, payments, and money-movement systems, primarily with Java, PostgreSQL, and AWS, with some React. The role is senior and heavily backend-focused, with an eye toward transitioning more of the stack to TypeScript over time.

You’ll mentor engineers, make architecture decisions, and work closely with product and engineering leaders to shape a reliable, scalable financial platform while delivering real impact for our customers.

Qualifications

• Production financial systems experience.
• Experience with ledgers, payments, or money movement.
• Strong backend engineering with Java.
• Relational database data models with accuracy and maintainability.
• Ability to drive technical judgments and lead by example.

Responsibilities

• Drive architecture and implementation for ledger, payments, and money movement capabilities.
• Design systems handling financial events, balances, reimbursements, and reconciliation.
• Build reliable backend services, integrations, and data models for precise financial workflows.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to shape the financial platform direction.
• Mentor engineers and establish strong engineering patterns for financial systems.
• Contribute hands-on technical leadership without formal people management.
• Influence long-term stack decisions, including TS transition planning.

Skills

Backend engineering

Financial systems knowledge

Mentorship

Architectural decision making

Tools

Java

PostgreSQL

AWS

TypeScript

React

Job description

About Take Command

Take Command is a start-up on a mission to improve the healthcare system, starting with health insurance. Pragmatically speaking, we help employers reimburse employees for individual insurance instead of offering a traditional one-size-fits-all group plan. We believe this model can empower employees (when they have the right support) to be savvy healthcare consumers and have a transformative impact on the entire healthcare system.

Let’s be honest—health insurance is usually a confusing, frustrating, and even emotional experience for people. We want to fix that with a new model, great technology, and a superior user experience. We have made a great start, but we need your help to fully realize our long-term vision.

About the Role

Take Command is building the financial foundation for a better health insurance experience. As more employers use our platform to reimburse employees for individual insurance, how money moves through our system becomes critical to making that experience affordable, reliable, and easy to understand.

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer with real experience building ledger, payments, card, reimbursement, or money movement systems in production.

This is a senior role with meaningful influence over the technical and product direction of our financial systems. You’ll help us make sound architectural decisions, avoid common pitfalls in financial system design, and raise the team’s understanding of proven ledger and payment patterns.

The role is full-stack, but heavily backend-leaning. Most of your work will be in Java, Postgres, and AWS, with occasional React work where needed. Over time, we expect more of our stack to move toward TypeScript, and you’ll have an opportunity to help shape that transition.

What You'll Do

• Drive architecture and implementation for ledger, payments, and money movement capabilities, both through your own contributions and by guiding technical decisions across the team
• Design systems that handle financial events, balances, reimbursements, payment states, reconciliation, reversals, and related workflows
• Build reliable backend services, integrations, and data models for systems where correctness matters
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to shape the direction of our financial platform
• Bring practical experience from production financial systems to help us avoid common mistakes and choose proven patterns
• Mentor other engineers and help establish strong engineering patterns for financial systems
• This role doesn’t require people management, but the opportunity does exist

What We're Looking For

• Significant experience building and operating production financial systems
• Hands-on experience with ledgers, payment systems, card payments, banking integrations, reimbursements, or similar money movement infrastructure
• Strong backend engineering experience, ideally with Java or a similar language
• Strong relational database experience, especially with data models that require accuracy, traceability, and long-term maintainability
• Ability to lead through technical judgment, clear communication, mentorship, and execution
• Comfort working through ambiguous product and technical problems
• A product-minded approach to engineering, with an interest in how technical decisions affect customers, operations, and the business
• Pragmatic judgment about when to invest deeply, when to keep things simple, and how to make tradeoffs without losing sight of financial integrity

Compensation

• $165,000 - $235,000 + 10% bonus
• We believe employees should be compensated fairly based on the market in which they live and work. Using geographic market data helps us maintain competitive pay, support internal equity, and ensure a consistent approach to compensation decisions across the company.

Working at Take Command

We’re excited to build a team and culture that reflects our values! We offer competitive pay and health benefits to share with this position.

• A generously funded ICHRA for medical, dental, and vision premiums and medical expenses. You get to use our own product and we think that’s so exciting and rare!
• Unlimited personal vacation in addition to regular company holidays.
• 401(k): 90-day eligibility for 4% match that vests over 4 years with a one year cliff!
• We have two beautiful offices in Richardson, Texas (City Line) and Austin, Texas. The kitchen is well-stocked and we\'ve designed the space to have lots of different areas to work--lounge on the couch, stand near your colleague at a kiosk desk or hole up in one of our phone rooms!
• Competitive parental leave for new parents.
• Up to two paid days of Paw-ternity leave. We recognize that pets are family too - and supporting life outside of work (including four-legged members) matters!
• ClassPass corporate membership with access to over 73,000 fitness and wellness options.
• Flexible on where you work – we believe in the power of connecting with intention! While we hope to see you around the office on a regular basis, you also have the ability to work from home some when you need to get focus work done.

More About Us

We secured our Series B funding in 2023 and are thrilled to be able to expand our team. Despite being a small startup in a land of health insurance giants, we’re the recognized industry leader for what we do (health insurance reimbursements) and passionate about bringing it to market because we know we can help fix a broken system and improve our clients’ wellbeing and health outcomes. We’ve been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and other national healthcare publications and are excited about our growth opportunities.

Take Command knows diversity and inclusion among our teammates is integral to our company’s success and growth. Our vision is to recruit, develop, and retain the best team from a diverse candidate pool. This has mostly been about us, but we’d love to hear from you--we can’t wait to hear your story!

Take Command is an equal opportunity employer! We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.