Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Zocks is a venture-backed startup building AI tools to automate data entry and streamline workflows for the financial services sector. We are looking for a senior technical leader to shape our product architecture and guide our engineering team as we scale our platform. In this capacity, you will own the technical roadmap for our core data ingestion pipelines, ensuring they can handle the volume and complexity of financial data. You will be responsible for translating ambiguous product requirements into robust technical specifications that the team can execute against. You will design the guardrails and patterns that allow our AI models to operate reliably in production at scale. Your work will directly influence the reliability and performance of the platform that our customers depend on for mission-critical financial operations. You will act as the primary architect for new features, balancing innovation with the need for stability and maintainability.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and implement scalable data ingestion services that process financial documents using advanced AI models.
• Translate complex product requirements into technical designs that balance performance, maintainability, and time-to-market.
• Lead the technical design reviews for major features, ensuring alignment with long-term system architecture goals.
• Establish and enforce coding standards and best practices across the Python and React codebases.
• Mentor senior engineers and junior developers through hands-on code reviews and technical coaching sessions.
• Collaborate with the product team to break down epics into technical tasks that can be iterated on in agile sprints.
• Build and maintain internal frameworks for automated testing, continuous deployment, and real-time service monitoring.
• Optimize the performance of distributed workflows, identifying bottlenecks in synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns.
• Own the documentation for core system components, ensuring knowledge is shared and developer onboarding is efficient.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and libraries to determine their applicability to our specific financial use cases.
• Partner with data scientists to integrate machine learning models into the production environment seamlessly.
• Drive the improvement of developer tooling to reduce manual effort and accelerate feature delivery.
• Ensure all system designs comply with the security and data integrity standards required for financial services.
• Guide the evolution of our cloud infrastructure on AWS to support growth without sacrificing reliability.

Requirements

• Possess 7+ years of full-stack software development experience, with a significant portion spent writing production code.
• Demonstrate professional proficiency in Python for backend services and React for user interface development.
• Show a proven track record of leading architectural decisions that have shaped the technical direction of previous products.
• Have substantial experience mentoring other developers, including conducting code reviews and providing actionable feedback.
• Exhibit the ability to independently analyze complex system failures and devise robust preventative solutions.
• Provide evidence of deep, practical knowledge of Amazon Web Services services such as EC2, S3, and Lambda.
• Bring experience working within fast-paced, iterative agile environments, preferably in a startup context.
• Maintain professional fluency in both English and Hungarian, enabling clear communication with all stakeholders.
• Hold a strong understanding of software design patterns and their application in real-world engineering problems.
• Show commitment to writing clean, testable code and contributing to a healthy codebase.

Nice to have

• Demonstrated interest in artificial intelligence technologies and awareness of recent advancements in the field.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects or publishing technical content related to software engineering.

Practical notes

Compensation includes a competitive base salary, employee equity program, and premium health insurance. Additional benefits include a SZEP-card, AYCM package, learning and development contribution, extra PTO, home office support, and daily office lunches and snacks. We are an equal opportunity employer.

You will work from our Budapest office located in the XI. district, following an on-site schedule from Monday to Thursday, with Friday designated as a remote workday to accommodate personal workflows. The role is a full-time position requiring your presence during standard business hours to facilitate collaboration with the team. Please note that this position requires access to on-site facilities due to the sensitive nature of the financial data handled by our platform.