Software Engineer, Upstart Bank
Job description
About the role
You will own backend outcomes for Upstart Bank from intake to ship, ensuring that regulations and data transform into reliable, production-grade services. This role demands delivering high-quality software within a regulated financial environment, balancing technical execution with strict compliance requirements. You will shape the technology behind one of the first modern AI-enabled national banks, directly influencing how credit access evolves nationwide. The position requires maintaining calm clarity under pressure while implementing systems that adhere to legal and operational standards. You will work on the infrastructure that drives a unified federal banking framework, replacing fragmented state-based structures. Your contributions will simplify regulatory complexity and enhance pricing, compliance, and credit scalability for borrowers. This is an opportunity to build foundational services that define the future of AI-driven banking.
Key facts
What you'll do
Design intake pipelines that normalize signals and validate rules for compliance boundaries, ensuring data integrity before processing.
Build core banking services and decision APIs that scale reliably across regulated workflows, maintaining performance under variable loads.
Review cross-functional specifications to confirm logic, risk controls, and data contracts before integration, preventing downstream misalignment.
Ship features behind flags, coordinate rollouts, and observe behavior in production environments to validate assumptions and user impact.
Partner with compliance and legal to translate policy language into testable system constraints and monitoring rules that enforce regulatory adherence.
Improve observability and runbooks so incidents are detected, diagnosed, and resolved faster, reducing downtime and service risk.
Own reliability patterns such as idempotency, retries, and graceful degradation for critical paths, ensuring system resilience during failures.
Collaborate with product and operations to prioritize backlog items under regulatory and market constraints, aligning delivery with business goals.
Implement automated checks that enforce lending policies and risk thresholds, enabling proactive detection of compliance deviations.
Instrument services to support auditability and traceability, providing clear records for internal reviews and external examinations.
Optimize data flows between AI models and decisioning layers, ensuring outputs remain consistent, explainable, and within defined risk parameters.
Establish testing strategies that validate behavior across edge cases, regulatory scenarios, and evolving requirements without disrupting production stability.
Collaborate with data teams to refine signal quality, validate model inputs, and ensure that insights used in decisions remain accurate and current.
Drive continuous improvement by analyzing operational metrics, identifying bottlenecks, and proposing architectural changes that enhance scalability.
Requirements
Bring 3 years of backend experience with object-oriented or statically typed languages, demonstrating mastery of core programming principles.
Demonstrate understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, idempotency, and failure modes, applying them to real-world service designs.
Read regulations and translate them into automated checks and monitoring rules, embedding compliance directly into system behavior.
Write tests and reviews that keep behavior predictable when requirements evolve, ensuring long-term maintainability and correctness.
Communicate clearly with engineers, product, and compliance stakeholders under tight timelines, aligning technical decisions with business needs.
Demonstrate experience building and maintaining services that operate in production financial environments, with attention to security and reliability.
Show proficiency in writing clean, modular code that can be understood and extended by other engineers over time.
Commit to following established processes for incident response, change management, and documentation within regulated settings.
Nice to have
Hands-on experience in lending, credit, or financial services domains, with familiarity with risk, compliance, or decisioning workflows.
Skills & tools
The platform operates using AI lending marketplace technologies. Engineers work with Upstart Bank infrastructure, utilizing Python, SQL, Java, REST APIs, Kafka, cloud platforms, and observability tools. All tool mentions are drawn directly from the source materials.
Practical notes
Impact and collaboration
Engineers work across a variety of bank initiatives while partnering closely with Product, Compliance, Legal, Risk, Finance, Operations, and Engineering. Your contributions will help shape a national banking platform that leverages AI to expand affordable credit. Every idea, voice, and contribution moves the initiative closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress. The role supports both digital-first flexibility and intentional in-person collaboration across teams.
About the company
Online lending marketplace connects borrowers with investors. Company uses digital tools to handle loan applications and funding. Focus remains on personal credit and employment data. Service aims to speed approval decisions. Operations support multiple products. Team works on assessment models. Goal involves expanding access to credit. Platform seeks to simplify financial requests for users. Members analyze risk using technology. Program helps manage loan lifecycle from application to payout.