Staff Software Engineer (Seattle)
Félix
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Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
Félix seeks a Staff Software Engineer to join the Platform Core team, building foundational services and infrastructure that power Félix’s products. You will identify bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and ensure services can support the company’s continued growth while maintaining a high level of availability.
The ideal candidate has 8+ years in distributed systems, deep backend experience (Python, Go, or Java), cloud-native stacks on GCP, and expertise in REST APIs, gRPC, Kubernetes, and
Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with distributed systems.
- Backend expertise in Python, Go, or Java; REST APIs, gRPC, SQL/NoSQL databases.
- Experience on Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability/monitoring.
- Ability to drive architectural decisions and mentor engineers.
- Strong communication to cross-functional teams and executives.
Responsibilities
- Architect and build foundational microservices and platform infrastructure.
- Improve system resilience with monitoring, incident response, retries, and automated recovery.
- Identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and support hyper-growth with high availability.
- Provide strategic technical leadership and align with multiple squads.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and promote best practices.
- Deliver high-quality software rapidly in CI/CD environments.
Skills
Tools
Job description
At Félix, we're building the financial ecosystem for Latin immigrants in the U.S., starting with a revolution in remittances. Our core product is an AI-powered chatbot built on WhatsApp, allowing our users to send money home as easily as sending a text message. We leverage cutting-edge technology like AI, blockchain, and stablecoins to make cross-border payments faster, more affordable, and more accessible than ever before.
At Félix, we're building the financial ecosystem for Latin immigrants in the U.S., starting with a revolution in remittances. Our core product is an AI-powered chatbot built on WhatsApp, allowing our users to send money home as easily as sending a text message. We leverage cutting-edge technology like AI, blockchain, and stablecoins to make cross-border payments faster, more affordable, and more accessible than ever before. We are a hyper-growth Series C company, backed by over $200 million in funding from top-tier global investors, including QED, Castle Island, Switch Ventures, HTwenty, Monashees, and Andreessen Horowitz with support from General Catalyst Customer Value Fund. This isn't just about the numbers; it's a testament to the trust our investors have in our vision and our team. Additionally, Félix was selected as an “Endeavour Entrepreneur” and was a recipient of the CrossTech Fintech Startups Award. We are a group of extremely talented and dedicated high-performers, united by our shared obsession with a single goal: empowering our customers. We are all owners of Félix, driven by a bias for action and a true experimentation spirit to get things done with urgency and focus. Joining Félix means you will be part of a team building a legacy, a company that will outlive us all. This is a rare opportunity to apply your skills to a deeply meaningful mission—serving a community that has been underserved for too long. We are a team that is fiercely loyal to each other, where radical transparency and constructive feedback are how we grow and push for excellence. We are bold, we care less about what others are doing, and more about creating sustainable value and a product that truly makes our users' lives better. We are building the future, today.
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Core team, you will join a high-caliber group responsible for the foundational services and infrastructure that power Félix’s products. You will identify bottlenecks, improve system efficiency, and ensure that our services can support the company’s continued growth while maintaining a high level of availability. This role requires balancing rapid execution with sound engineering principles. You will participate in the development of customer-facing and business-critical features in a fast-paced environment, ensuring that new functionality is delivered without compromising system stability or accumulating unnecessary technical debt. Success in this role requires curiosity, strong technical judgment, and the ability to think beyond individual components to deliver solutions that benefit the organization as a whole. The ideal candidate is someone who enjoys solving complex distributed systems problems, takes ownership of outcomes, and is passionate about building systems that are scalable, reliable, and easy for other teams to build upon.
- Front-end: React, HTTP, HTML/DOM, JavaScript, CSS, AJAX
- Back-end: Python, Flask/FastAPI, REST APIs, Redis, SQL, gRPC
- Cloud: Google Cloud services (Firestore, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, Google Artifact Registry, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud Composer, etc.)
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Terraform, NewRelic, PagerDuty
- Architect & Build: Design, build, and optimize foundational microservices and infrastructure that power the company’s products.
- System Resilience: Improve the resilience of the platform by designing systems that gracefully handle failures. Implement monitoring and observability solutions, improve incident response processes, and build mechanisms such as retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks, and automated recovery strategies.
- Scalability & Performance: Identify bottlenecks, improve system efficiency, and ensure services support continued hyper-growth while maintaining high availability.
- Strategic Technical Leadership: Set the architectural vision for the platform. Understand how services interact, how data flows through the system, and how decisions made in one area impact the broader platform.
- Cross-Squad Collaboration: Work alongside other Staff Engineers across Payments, Disbursements, and GRC to align on shared infrastructure, API contracts, and event-driven standards.
- Mentorship & Talent Development: Mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers, championing best practices in system design, testing, domain-driven design, and engineering culture.
- Fast-paced execution: Thrive in an agile, high-velocity environment, translating product requirements into production-ready code with speed and precision.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record in building and operating complex distributed systems.
- Expertise in backend technologies such as Python (preferred), Go, or Java, along with solid experience in REST APIs, gRPC, and SQL/NoSQL databases.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems principles, including idempotency, concurrency control, failure domains, and microservices architecture.
- Proven experience improving system resilience (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks) and building robust observability/monitoring solutions.
- Experience operating distributed systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform, or equivalent cloud-native stacks.
- Strong ability to navigate ambiguity, set architectural vision, and drive technical initiatives with company-wide impact.
- Strategic Influence: Ability to break down ambiguous business problems, communicate technical decisions to non-technical executives, and drive alignment across multiple teams.
- Demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality software rapidly in a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environment.
- Fluent or advanced English.
- Salary range: 200k - 250k USD
- Initial stock options grant
- Annual performance bonus
- Health, dental, and vision plans
- 401(k) with employer matching
- Hybrid working model
- Continuous learning opportunities
- Unlimited PTO
- Paid parental leave
- Empowering opportunities for growth in a dynamic entrepreneurial environment
At Félix, we are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, or disability. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruitment, hiring, placement, promotion, training, compensation, benefits, and termination.
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