Staff Engineer, Backend

About the role

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease. We're headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays). Broker Dealer is the core of the Betterment platform. On a busy day, we securely move millions of dollars through the Betterment system and ensure each transaction flows through a complex series of risk checks for strict regulatory compliance. Every ounce of efficiency and intelligence we pour into this system translates into more value for our customers. We're looking for engineers to help us answer some of our most difficult backend scaling, software design, and optimization questions. As a Staff Engineer in our Broker Dealer organization, you will help define our technical vision, improve system stability, drive on-time delivery, mentor our team of amazing engineers, and help scale our systems in the next chapter of our growth. This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we have reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment's total compensation package for employees. New York City: $210,000-245,000. This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

Key facts

What you'll do

Drive the technical vision and long-term strategy for the Broker Dealer backend platform while mentoring senior engineers and guiding system architecture decisions.

Build and evolve innovative trading and money-movement technology that empowers people to make the most of their money, so they can live better and achieve financial wellness.

Solve complex "impossible" problems in securities processing, risk checks, and regulatory compliance by designing scalable backend solutions that ensure on-time delivery.

Collaborate with product, compliance, and operations stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical specifications and secure, reliable services.

Scale core backend software components to handle millions of dollars in secure transactions daily while maintaining strict regulatory standards and system stability.

Lead cross-functional projects spanning multiple engineering teams, considering tradeoffs between speed, quality, performance, and security to ensure successful execution.

Mentor and elevate the capabilities of fellow engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing to strengthen the overall engineering culture.

Create efficiency in our critical financial workflows by writing clean code, applying pragmatic programming techniques, and optimizing database and service performance.

Champion testing and quality practices, ensuring that investments in solid tests and automation pay off repeatedly through higher reliability and fewer production incidents.

Absorb agility and pragmatism in software development to adapt quickly to changing business needs while preserving a high standard of product quality and user trust.

Maintain transparency with users and stakeholders by building tools that provide consistent, reliable experiences and clear insights into money movement and risk controls.

Contribute to the broader engineering community at Betterment by sharing best practices, proposing improvements, and helping define engineering standards for backend systems.

Support the deployment and operation of backend services in production, collaborating with site reliability and operations teams to ensure resilience and observability.

Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural patterns to determine their applicability to our broker dealer infrastructure and long-term roadmap.

Work alongside security and compliance experts to ensure that all money movement and transaction processing meets or exceeds regulatory requirements.

Requirements

10+ years of professional experience in at least one object-oriented language, with a strong emphasis on Java expertise.

7+ years of professional experience with SQL and relational databases, including designing schemas and writing detailed SQL queries for complex financial data.

A strong command of fundamental algorithms and data structures to solve challenging problems efficiently and correctly.

Experience scaling and optimizing systems in large-scale distributed environments where performance, reliability, and security are critical.

Experience designing, building, scaling, and maintaining core backend software components that handle money movement and risk checks.

Proven ability to lead and manage projects across one or more engineering teams, balancing tradeoffs to ensure on-time delivery without compromising quality, performance, or security.

An understanding of how to make the necessary tradeoffs to ship features rapidly while preserving system integrity, regulatory compliance, and customer trust.

Knowing that consistent investment in testing, automation, and observability pays for itself many times over in stability and velocity.

Appreciation for agile methodologies and pragmatic engineering practices that enable fast, iterative delivery in a regulated financial environment.

Nice to have

None specified.

Practical notes

This is a full-time position based in New York City. The role may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.