Staff Engineer, User Engagement

About the role

You will architect and own the end to end technical strategy for the User Engagement product that guides customers through pivotal life events such as buying a first home, planning for retirement, and navigating major life milestones. You will translate complex business requirements into robust technical solutions that scale to serve hundreds of thousands of users relying on Betterment for investing and saving their money. This role demands a passion for financial wellness and the ability to solve intricate problems that make saving and investing feel simple and intuitive. You will be responsible for shaping the technical vision, driving execution across the full stack, and ensuring that the systems you build deliver delightful, reliable, and high performance customer experiences.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define the technical roadmap and system architecture for the User Engagement domain in collaboration with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to ensure alignment with business objectives.

Lead the design, implementation, and operation of complex software systems across the full stack, maintaining a rigorous focus on performance, reliability, observability, and maintainability.

Partner cross functionally to translate product goals into pragmatic phased delivery plans, clarifying tradeoffs and guiding decision making from discovery through release.

Mentor engineers across multiple levels by providing feedback, conducting design reviews, pairing on code, and fostering day to day technical leadership that raises the standard of craft.

Champion engineering practices by reducing technical debt, improving developer workflows, and making strategic investments in architecture to create leverage for the team.

Collaborate with other senior and Staff engineers to evaluate emerging patterns and technologies, adopting new tools thoughtfully when they enhance the customer or developer experience.

Drive consensus building and influence technical direction among both technical and non technical stakeholders, ensuring alignment and clarity on priorities and constraints.

Elevate the engineering culture by sharing knowledge, strengthening practices, and contributing to an inclusive, high trust environment that encourages experimentation and ownership.

Write clean, testable, and well documented code that sets a bar for quality across the codebase and supports long term maintainability.

Optimize the developer experience by improving tooling, automating manual processes, and streamlining CI/CD pipelines to accelerate delivery without sacrificing stability.

Ensure that customer facing applications built with React or similar frameworks provide fast, reliable, and accessible experiences, leveraging data models and APIs effectively.

Design and implement data access layers and database interactions using relational databases, with strong proficiency in schema design and complex SQL queries.

Evaluate and recommend server side technologies, with a focus on Ruby on Rails, while bringing strong fundamentals in languages such as Java, Python, or C# to solve diverse problems.

Act as a technical leader during critical phases of project delivery, from scoping and requirements validation through implementation, testing, and rollout.

Requirements

You have proven experience scoping, leading, and delivering complex technical projects from discovery through release, demonstrating ownership and accountability.

You bring strong full stack engineering experience, with a demonstrated ability to build customer facing web applications and the supporting systems that make them possible.

You possess strong experience in at least one server side language, with familiarity with Ruby on Rails being a plus, and deep understanding of languages such as Java, Python, or C#.

You are proficient in building frontend applications using React or a comparable framework, with additional experience in GraphQL being a valuable asset.

You have a solid grasp of relational databases, including schema design and the ability to write detailed, optimized SQL queries.

You exercise strong technical judgment, consistently evaluating tradeoffs and making pragmatic decisions that uphold high standards of quality.

You have a history of building consensus, influencing technical direction, and collaborating effectively with both technical and non technical stakeholders.

You hold a Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience, and you bring 8 or more years of relevant professional experience in software engineering or a related field.

You are comfortable working in a fast paced, dynamic environment where priorities can shift and problems require creative and efficient solutions.

You communicate clearly and persuasively, whether explaining technical concepts to non technical partners or documenting decisions for the team.

You are committed to fostering an inclusive, collaborative culture and acting as a role model for others in the engineering organization.

You demonstrate resilience and ownership, readily stepping in to address challenging issues and driving solutions to completion.

You are passionate about learning and continuously improving your skills, staying current with industry trends and best practices.

You have worked on distributed systems or services with reasonable scalability demands, ensuring that solutions remain robust under load.

You have experience with testing frameworks and practices, valuing automated testing as a means to ensure reliability and reduce regressions.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source projects or publishing libraries or tools used by other developers.

Background in financial services, fintech, or domains where compliance and security considerations are important.

Familiarity with infrastructure as code practices and cloud platforms where Betterment operates.

Experience with A/B testing frameworks, experimentation platforms, or analytics instrumentation to inform product decisions.

Knowledge of accessibility standards and a track record of building inclusive user interfaces.

Practical notes

This role is based in New York City and follows a hybrid schedule requiring four days in the office per week, with flexibility around summer and winter holiday periods.

The base salary range for this position in New York City is $200,000 to $238,000, and the role may also be eligible for variable compensation through a company incentive bonus.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship for this position.