Senior Software Engineer, Unsecured Installments

About the Team

Unsecured Installments is one of Upstart's core lending products, helping borrowers access credit through a seamless, digitally native experience. The team owns critical parts of the borrower journey across offer generation, pricing, underwriting, funding, and borrower experience, while working closely with the broader lending platform that powers Upstart at scale.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Unsecured Installments team, you'll be a technical leader for frontend and full-stack experiences that borrowers interact with directly. Working primarily in React and TypeScript, you'll own the delivery of large, multi-month projects, shape the architecture of mobile-web and full-stack surfaces, and set a high bar for quality across the borrower experience.

How You'll Make an Impact

• Own the design and delivery of large, complex backend and full-stack initiatives, from planning and sequencing through launch and long-term maintenance.
• Set technical direction for the team's service architecture, APIs, data models, and system integrations, owning a 3–6 month roadmap.
• Partner closely with product, frontend, design, platform, and other backend engineers to translate priorities into scalable, high-quality systems.
• Raise the bar for engineering excellence through thoughtful service and API design, data integrity, testing, observability, security, and operational rigor.
• Lead through ambiguity by breaking down loosely defined problems into clear, testable plans and using data to inform tradeoffs.
• Mentor and grow other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance.
• Contribute to how the team uses AI in development workflows and product capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, and 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep proficiency designing and building backend services and APIs in a language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, Ruby, or Node.js.
• Strong experience with service architecture, API design, data modeling, relational or non-relational databases, and distributed systems.
• Track record of independently leading the design and delivery of large, business-critical backend or full-stack projects in production.
• Experience building reliable production systems, including testing, monitoring, incident response, performance optimization, and long-term operational ownership.
• Ability to work effectively in ambiguous environments where product requirements, constraints, and system boundaries evolve over time.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and align product and engineering partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience serving as the backend or full-stack technical lead for a product team or business-critical system.
• Experience building consumer-facing products or high-volume transactional systems with strong requirements around reliability, scalability, correctness, and security.
• Background in fintech, lending, payments, or other regulated financial products.
• Experience with distributed systems, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, or service-oriented architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, relational and non-relational data stores, messaging systems, and CI/CD workflows.
• Experience with experimentation, feature flagging, or platform capabilities supporting iterative product improvements.
• Hands-on experience leveraging generative AI in product features or internal engineering workflows.