Tech Lead, Foundations

Description

Remote (ET & CT time zones only; some travel required)

Clasp is a mission-driven, venture-backed startup transforming access to education and career pathways. A college education was always meant to lead to economic mobility. But with rising costs and shrinking loan availability, many working-class and first-generation students don’t have the money they need to finish school. That’s where Clasp comes in. We’re the market leader in institutionally funded gap loan programs. We partner with schools to design, launch and manage lending programs that keep students enrolled, graduating and thriving.

Fresh off our Series B, Clasp is entering its next phase of growth. Recent recognition includes:

TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026 (Loan-Linked Hiring)

Forbes Fintech 50

Business Insider: Top 14 Healthcare Startups to Watch in 2026 and 43 Startups to Bet Your Career On in 2025

Our work spans two business lines:

Clasp Talent helps healthcare employers attract and retain critical talent by connecting them with diverse candidates and using student loan repayment as a powerful recruiting and retention tool. We meaningfully connect employers, educational institutions, and learners to drive mutual benefit.

Clasp Finance equips colleges and universities with lending technology to launch and operate their own private student loan programs, enabling schools to step in and support their students directly with financial aid.

Join us on our journey to give power to learners and unlock fulfilling careers that drive positive change in their communities and beyond.

Who We Need

We're looking for a Tech Lead to anchor our new Foundations team in Clasp Talent. Foundations owns the core services and infrastructure that every Talent domain team builds on: user management and SSO, notifications, data exchange with employers, schools, and partners, and the shared platform patterns that sit underneath them. Your job is to make those building blocks reliable, well documented, and easy for other teams to adopt, so product teams ship faster without rebuilding the same plumbing.

This is a player-coach role. You will write and review code every week, set technical direction for the team, and mentor engineers of all levels. You'll partner with product, the other domain teams, and our technical leadership to decide what belongs in the foundation and what doesn't. You use AI tools deliberately to move faster, you have strong opinions about APIs and system design, and you can explain a tradeoff to a non-engineer in a way that leads to a decision.

At Clasp we run a DevOps culture where engineers have full ownership of the code they write and the infrastructure it runs on. We want someone who is excited to shape the architecture behind the product roadmap and the Clasp business, and to grow alongside us.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for Talent's shared services, including user management, authentication and SSO, role-based access control, and notification systems (email, in-app, and other channels).
• Design and evolve our approach to data exchange: APIs, events, webhooks, and file-based integrations with employers, schools, HRIS and other partner systems, with clear contracts, versioning, and observability.
• Build reusable services, libraries, and patterns that domain teams can adopt with minimal friction. Treat other engineering teams as your customers: write the docs, gather feedback, and measure adoption.
• Write code alongside the team across the front end and back end, and set the bar for code quality, system design, and security through hands-on contribution and code review.
• Work with Product, Security, and Compliance to define requirements for identity, access, consent, and data handling in a regulated, financial-services-adjacent environment.
• Break large initiatives into milestones, spec stories with the team and product leadership, and balance platform investment and technical debt against feature requests from domain teams.
• Mentor and coach engineers, and help the team build an engineering culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement. This role has no direct reports at the start, with a path toward managing people as the team grows.
• Apply AI-assisted development (code generation, test writing, refactoring, documentation) to raise quality and speed, and share what works with the wider engineering org.
• Build resilient, self-healing systems using infrastructure as code, monitoring, and alerting, and participate in the on-call rotation for the services Foundations owns.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent bootcamp or upskilling program experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent, including time leading technical direction for a team or a shared platform, at a SaaS startup or similar environment.
• Experience designing APIs and integration patterns used by other teams or external partners, with attention to contracts, backward compatibility, and documentation.
• Strong fluency in Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI, or similar) and TypeScript/JavaScript (React, Next.js), and a PostgreSQL-backed data model.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar), cloud infrastructure (AWS or Google Cloud), infrastructure as code, and production monitoring.
• Experience working with Product and Compliance or Security teams in financial services or another regulated environment.
• AI-native in your workflow: you use coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc.) as a real force multiplier and are excited about what AI unlocks for engineering.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You can articulate technical tradeoffs, align stakeholders, and make sound decisions under ambiguity.
• A genuine interest in technology that expands access to education and economic mobility.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating identity and access systems: authentication, SSO (SAML, OIDC, OAuth), user provisioning (e.g., SCIM), and role-based permissions.
• Experience building notification or messaging systems (transactional email, templating, preferences, delivery tracking, retries) or similar event-driven infrastructure.
• Experience building internal platform or "paved road" capabilities that multiple product teams adopt.
• Experience with enterprise customers' identity requirements (IdP integrations, domain verification, just-in-time provisioning).
• Familiarity with HRIS or ATS integrations, or with education data standards.
• Experience with data privacy and security frameworks (SOC 2, FERPA, GLBA) and their technical implications.
• Prior experience mentoring engineers or moving into engineering management.
• What We Give In Return
• Competitive cash and equity compensation
• Health benefits (health, dental, & vision)
• Student loan repayment benefits
• 401k + match
• Flexible PTO policy
• Opportunities to grow and perform in a fast-paced environment alongside a stellar team

Conditions

The salary range for this position is competitive and will be commensurate with the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and industry knowledge, ranging between $175,00-$190,000 annually. In addition to the base salary, we offer an attractive equity component as part of our compensation package, providing an opportunity for eligible employees to share in the success and growth of our company. We are committed to offering competitive compensation and benefits packages to attract and retain top talent.

Work authorization

This role is not eligible for immigration sponsorship, now or in the future. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States for any employer.

How we use AI in hiring

Clasp uses AI-assisted tools in parts of our hiring process, such as AI notetakers transcribing or summarizing interviews, scheduling, and supporting evaluation in technical assessments. Humans review applications and make every hiring decision. AI tools don't make final decisions about any candidate. You're welcome to use AI to research Clasp and prepare, but during live interviews and assessments we want to hear your own thinking, so please don't use AI tools that generate or feed you responses in real time. If you'd like to be evaluated without AI tools, need an accommodation, or have questions about how we use these tools, email recruiting@clasp.com and we'll arrange another process where we can.