Staff Software Engineer, Finance Engineering

Description

The company's finance platform must record every dollar it earns and spends on compute correctly, and transaction volume grows with Claude usage. Data arrives from across the company and from partners, covering usage and billing, compute, infrastructure assets and leases. New products and pricing models keep adding new paths into the books. The goal is a continuous close with zero material issues and audit-grade controls.

The role is to build the platform that makes this work: a single entry point for all finance events, an append-only ledger, and an accounting engine that posts each event exactly once. It is a distributed systems problem where correctness matters most. The system must be exact to the cent, replay cleanly, and explain any figure as of any date, at high volume. You will shape its architecture. Its users include Claude agents, which read and write through the same APIs and controls as people.

You will work closely with engineers in Billing, Compute and Infra on shared contracts and APIs, and with product owners, finance operations and internal audit to turn accounting and controls requirements into designs. A finance background is not required. Backend experience where correctness matters is what counts, and the domain can be taught.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the single entry point for finance, including APIs for apps and agents, an event bus for publishing systems, adapters for vendor apps and reports, data-quality gates, and exactly-once processing with replay and backfill
• Build the append-only ledger and accounting engine, including idempotent posting, a rules framework that converts business events into journal entries, the ERP integration, and period locks
• Design and build the SDKs and frameworks that finance apps and agents use
• Build audit trails, maker-checker, scoped access and segregation of duties into the platform as code
• Build and run the production services that other teams call in real time, such as the tax and collections services in the billing flow, and own their uptime, latency, throughput and correctness targets as agreed with those teams
• Set the platform's technical direction through architecture, engineering standards and design reviews

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering in a statically typed language such as Go, Java or Rust, or in Python at scale
• Experience designing and running high-volume, event-driven systems with publish/subscribe or streaming, including idempotent processing, replay and backfill
• Experience designing relational data models and writing SQL for complex, versioned data
• Experience designing APIs, SDKs and service-to-service integrations that other teams depend on
• Experience building systems that must meet auditability, access control or compliance requirements
• Experience turning requirements from non-engineering partners into technical designs
• Strong written and verbal communication, including design docs
• Preferred: 10+ years of experience
• Preferred: experience building developer platforms or paved paths
• Preferred: experience with streaming systems such as Pub/Sub or Kafka
• Preferred: experience building with LLMs and agents, including MCP
• Preferred: experience building a ledger, sub-ledger, billing or payments system
• Preferred: familiarity with accounting concepts such as double-entry and journal entries
• Preferred: familiarity with internal controls and audit concepts such as audit trails, segregation of duties and change management
• Preferred: exposure to ERP or financial systems, such as Workday Financials
• Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training and/or experience, in a field relevant to the role as shown through coursework, training or professional experience
• Years of experience required correspond to the internal job level for the position

Conditions

Annual salary range: $320,000 - $405,000 USD

The role is hybrid under the location-based policy: staff are expected in an office at least 25% of the time, and some roles may require more

Visa sponsorship is available, but not for every role and every candidate. If an offer is made, the company will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa and retains an immigration lawyer to help

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco

Equal-opportunity note: the company encourages applications from people who do not meet every qualification and welcomes a range of perspectives

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation and parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• An office space for collaborating with colleagues