Senior Software Engineer, Marketplace Optimization

Upstart is an AI lending marketplace that uses advanced technology to expand access to affordable credit. The Senior Software Engineer will design, build, and operate reliable distributed systems that power real-time lending marketplace decisions, including borrower matching, offer construction, and monetization. The role also involves cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, scalability improvements, and operational ownership of critical production services.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate highly available backend services that power Upstart's real-time lending marketplace
• Develop scalable systems that enable rapid experimentation while maintaining the reliability of business-critical production services
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Capital Markets, and Analytics to translate complex business problems into elegant technical solutions
• Build flexible platform capabilities that enable new marketplace optimization and monetization strategies
• Improve the scalability, observability, and operational excellence of systems responsible for real-time marketplace decisions
• Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, testing, and operational ownership of critical production systems

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems
• Experience developing production services using one or more of Ruby on Rails, Python, or Kotlin
• Experience designing APIs and building scalable distributed systems
• Experience operating business-critical production services with an emphasis on reliability, monitoring, testing, and operational excellence
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and modern cloud-native application development
• Experience collaborating across engineering, product, and business stakeholders
• This role is available in the following locations: Remote
• The team operates on the East/West coast time zones
• The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S or Canada (outside of Quebec) but are expected to spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites and in-person meetings. The onsite cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time
• Experience building marketplaces, recommendation systems, optimization engines, financial systems
• Experience with event-driven architectures, Kafka, workflow orchestration, or real-time data processing
• Experience partnering with Machine Learning or Data Science teams
• Experience improving platform scalability and evolving distributed system architecture
• Interest in solving complex optimization problems that combine technical and business tradeoffs