Senior Software Engineer

About the role

We are hiring Senior Software Engineers to help shape the future of January's platform. Instead of applying to individual teams, you will apply once and we will work together during the process to find the team where your skills and interests will make the biggest impact. Senior Engineers at January do more than write code. They own product outcomes, set technical direction, and mentor others while building systems that directly improve the financial lives of millions. You will step into collections, a space that functions like an emergency room where strangers triage crises with no follow-up, and you will transform that experience into primary care for consumer finance. In this role, you will ensure that 70 million Americans who fall behind on debt every year encounter a path that feels less like a penalty and more like support. You will leverage technology to meet people in their hardest financial moments and make the experience more human, directly increasing recovery rates and enabling creditors to net over 30% more than with traditional lenders. As we move upstream to prevent defaults and build across the entire consumer credit lifecycle, your work will determine whether the one in collections today becomes the one who gets approved tomorrow.

• Consumer Engagement - Owns end-to-end borrower communications across every channel, building the template and campaign management systems, authentication flows, and portal landing experiences that make every touchpoint intentional and well-timed.
• Consumer Conversion - Turns engaged borrowers into resolved debts through the portal, chatbot, settlements UX, payment plans, and retention flows, building personalized paths that remove friction and adapt to each borrower's financial reality.
• Consumer Voice - Owns Voice AI conversation flows for inbound and outbound calls, plus the LLM platform infrastructure - evals, consumer context, and guardrails - that scales AI-driven debt resolution and powers AI capabilities across the org.
• Consumer Resolution - Maximizes debt resolution on inbound contacts across phone, email, SMS, letters, and chatbot by building AI and human agent tooling that handles the complex, emotional conversations self-serve can't solve.
• Compliance & Money Ops - Runs the compliance and money movement backbone, building systems that automatically enforce thousands of regulations and process millions of dollars safely between consumers, January, and clients.
• Client Experience - Builds the onboarding systems, dashboards, data products, and internal tools that help our financial institution clients understand their borrowers, optimize portfolio strategies, and see clear value.

What you'll do

• Design and implement scalable systems that serve millions of borrowers and financial partners with resilience and low latency.
• Contribute to architecture and roadmap planning, influencing the direction of core projects based on data and user empathy.
• Lead by example through engineering excellence, best practices, and consistently high code quality that sets the standard for the organization.
• Mentor junior engineers, helping grow the team's skills and capabilities through thoughtful feedback and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Operations to deliver meaningful solutions that balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.
• Propose and iterate on organization-wide engineering processes, leveraging the support of other senior leaders to drive sustainable improvements.
• Build and maintain production-grade systems that handle the volume and complexity of over $20 billion in serviced debt across more than 20 million consumers.
• Optimize authentication flows and portal landing experiences to ensure borrowers feel secure and guided at every interaction.
• Implement guardrails and evals within LLM platforms to ensure AI-driven debt resolution remains accurate, safe, and compliant.
• Own critical touchpoints such as chatbot, settlements UX, and payment plans to reduce friction and increase resolution rates.
• Instrument systems for rigorous performance monitoring, enabling rapid response to issues and data-driven product decisions.
• Partner with Compliance & Money Ops to ensure money movement systems enforce thousands of regulations with zero tolerance for error.
• Translate complex product requirements into robust technical designs that align with long-term platform strategy.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software development experience in roles that demanded ownership of production systems and user impact.
• Strong technical expertise across core domains, comfortable with Python, React, Postgres, and AWS, while remaining open to learning and teaching these technologies within a fast-moving environment.
• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain production-grade systems at scale, where reliability, performance, and security are non-negotiable.
• A product-oriented mindset that prioritizes the impact of your work on users and the business, not just the delivery of code.
• Exceptional collaboration skills that allow you to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with ambiguous problems and shifting priorities.
• Comfort with decentralized decision-making, where the people closest to the problem own the calls and set the standards without needing constant approval.
• A bias for action where speed beats perfection, and you are comfortable running tight loops, making reversible decisions at 70%, and adjusting as you learn.
• Commitment to candor, where you prefer to hear a hard truth early rather than a polite sidestep that wastes time and resources.

Nice to have

• Experience contributing to voice AI conversation flows, LLM platforms, evals, and context management for high-volume, compliance-sensitive environments.
• Background in compliance, money movement, or regulated financial systems where rules are enforced programmatically and automatically.
• Prior work in collections, credit, or consumer finance, where you understand the emotional complexity of debt resolution.

Practical notes

This role is based in New York City and requires in-person presence. The engagement is full time, and candidates must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship at this time. No relocation or visa sponsorship is available for this position. There are no published compensation ranges listed for this role.