[Hiring] Staff Engineer @Eli

Role Description

We're hiring a Staff Engineer. Under the hood, Eli takes in applications from contractors and homeowners, verifies eligibility and documents, decides who gets paid, pays contractors early through a credit facility, tracks every dollar through a ledger, and reconciles it against the bank. A lot of what we build moves real money and gets audited.

You'll work directly with our two cofounders: Adrian, who heads product, and Eduardo, who heads engineering. We're a team of 7 engineers, including Adrian and Eduardo, both of whom commit to production daily. Each engineer owns a large part of the system, and your work shows up in production and in front of customers within days.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll set technical direction for the systems where correctness matters most: money movement, AI-driven decisions, and the platform underneath them. You'll still write and ship code every week. Here, seniority means more responsibility for outcomes, not more distance from the work.

This role is based in New York, and we work together in person there. For the right engineer, we can accommodate fully remote.

How We Work

• Almost all of the code we ship is written by AI agents.
• We run Claude Code across parallel worktrees, and our own bots handle PR review and first-pass production investigations.
• Our hand-crafted harness and internal tooling make this possible.
• We review everything carefully, and the engineer whose name is on the PR is responsible for every line in it.
• Good judgment is the scarce resource.

What You'll Own

• Technical direction: Decide how the ledger, decisioning, and platform evolve, write the designs other engineers build on, and raise the bar through code review and pairing.
• Product, end to end: Figure out what processors, contractors, and program administrators need, build it, watch it work or fail in production, and adjust.
• AI decisions that move money: Document verification, eligibility checks, and fraud detection.
• Money movement: The ledger, the loan tape we report to our lender, and reconciliation against bank records.
• Our internal tool stack: Consolidating the systems we've outgrown into our own agentic, in-house tools for operations and program configuration.
• The platform and production: CI speed, test-suite health, backups, database migrations, alerts, and workflows.

What We're Looking For

• You're a strong engineer with the AI turned off.
• You use AI agents heavily and remain the author.
• You measure your week by problems solved, not tickets closed.
• You care about the business and understand rebate programs, underwriting, and contractor payments.
• You're comfortable and competent in compliance- and security-heavy environments.
• You write short, clear updates: what's done, what's blocked, and when the next thing lands.
• You have strong opinions about your tools and can tell us why.

Experience

• 8+ years building production software, ideally some of it before AI coding tools.
• Staff-level scope or equivalent impact: you've led the design of a system other engineers build on and stayed accountable for it in production.
• Deep TypeScript on the backend and solid relational database skills in MySQL or Postgres.
• A track record of taking on work outside your assigned lane and finishing it.

Nice to have

• Temporal or another workflow engine.
• Payments, ledgers, lending, or reconciliation experience.
• dbt, Snowflake, or other analytics tooling.
• Evaluating LLM output with test sets and metrics.
• Infrastructure: Pulumi, Docker, Vercel, Tailscale, Datadog, Sentry.
• Energy programs or utility software experience.

Stack

• TypeScript Turborepo monorepo (pnpm with tsx for older systems, Bun for newer ones).
• Next.js, React, tRPC, Prisma.
• MySQL, moving to Postgres.
• Temporal, Python for document AI.
• Snowflake, dbt, Lightdash.
• Vercel, DigitalOcean, Pulumi.
• Datadog, Sentry.
• Claude Code with worktrees, plus internal agent tooling.

Compensation and Benefits

• The base salary range for this role is $220,000 - $250,000 annually, depending on experience, plus a meaningful equity package.
• Generous medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible, unlimited time off, with a minimum of three weeks encouraged.
• At least two company gatherings each year and budget to co-work when solving difficult problems together.
• A welcoming, family- and parent-friendly environment that values humility, honesty, and humor.
• Eli has a no-negotiation compensation policy.
• We encourage you to apply even if your experience does not map perfectly to every bullet.