Staff Software Engineer - Backend (Remote)

EMPOWER OVERVIEW
Empower is shaking up an outdated financial system by providing real opportunity for our customers: the opportunity to get the cash they need, to access fair credit, and to change their financial story. Today, we're helping millions of people find financial security through machine learning models that evaluate creditworthiness using a more inclusive lens and mobile-first products: Cash Advance, Thrive line of credit, and Petal credit cards. Tomorrow? Creating even more financial paths for our customers (and their wallets) to succeed.
This year, Empower ranked #65 on Inc. 5000's Fastest-Growing Private Companies list - our third year in a row cracking the top 100 - and was named by Forbes as one of the 25 Next Billion-Dollar Startups for 2024. Empower was also featured by Forbes on America's Best Startup Employers list in 2023, and our Thrive line of credit product was named by Fast Company as one of 2022's Next Big Things in Tech.
Empower is backed by Sequoia Capital, Blisce, and Icon Ventures. Ready to grow your impact and accelerate your career? Take a look at our open roles - we can't wait to meet you.
THE EMPOWER WAY
Great Expectations: We come up with bold, audacious goals for ourselves and go all out for impact
Owner Mindset: We give every employee latitude to act independently, make smart choices, and move the business forward
Spirited Debate: We love skeptics and seek counter opinions to challenge our personal assumptions and expand our view
Customer Obsession: We listen to understand, empathize, and create a memorable, rewarding experience for our community
Inclusive Collaboration: We believe diverse teams make the best decisions, and we strive to give diverse voices a seat at the table
No Jerks Allowed: We value our relationships and take the time to build trust and connection and communicate respectfully
WHAT EMPOWER OFFERS
Competitive salary
Generous equity package
Full healthcare benefits
Technology expense reimbursement
Work from anywhere
JOB DESCRIPTION
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our solutions. You will identify strategic technical needs, lead large-scale and complex product initiatives, and optimize our engineering processes. You will also take ownership of technological initiatives, from management and execution to solution design and progress reporting. In addition, you will serve as a lead interviewer, mentor other engineers, and lead incident responses.
Your role will also involve designing, building, and deploying server application code, implementing secure coding standards, and meeting sprint goals. You will monitor the performance of our server application, participate in the server ops on-call schedule, and work towards minimizing defects and improving reliability.
Travel for company offsites is expected at a minimum 2 times a year.
Key Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities to foster optimal product direction, collaborate closely with business stakeholders to streamline and simplify designs, and proactively identify areas of risk and tradeoffs that can be enhanced.
• Ownership of technical initiatives, being accountable for the initiative's outcome, managing and executing the project, designing the solution and defining its requirements, reporting on the initiative's progress, and coordinating resources.
• Perform as a lead technical interviewer
• Lead technical reviewer of Empower Engineering blog posts
• Mentor Engineers up to and including Senior levels
• Lead SEV1 and lower incident response through to resolution
• Lead engineering of large scale and complex product initiatives
• Culture leader across the engineering organization, delivery team and platform team

Candidate Qualifications

• Minimum 10 years, ideally 15+ years developing web APIs within .NET (C#)
• Working experience with ORMs such as Entity Framework
• Working experience constructing and optimising RDMS queries
• Working experience within the asynchronous programming model
• General knowledge of Messaging Queues eg. AMQP
• General knowledge of PaaS environments eg. Azure

At Empower, we hire for people that push themselves to understand others and seek out ways to challenge their personal assumptions. Our hope is that by fostering such an environment, we strengthen our business and relationships by putting people first. We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workspace where everyone (regardless of age, education, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any personal characteristics) feels like they belong. Even if your experience doesn't exactly match up to our job description, you should feel empowered to apply regardless!
At Empower, we hire for people that push themselves to understand others and seek out ways to challenge their personal assumptions. Our hope is that by fostering such an environment, we strengthen our business and relationships by putting people first. We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workspace where everyone (regardless of age, education, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any personal characteristics) feels like they belong. Even if your experience doesn't exactly match up to our job description, you should feel empowered to apply regardless!