Empower is a high-growth financial technology company on a mission to expand access to fair credit to give anyone in the world the opportunity to improve their financial security and mobility. We dream up and launch one-of-a-kind features that help our members get money instantly whenever they need it, save for the future, and rewrite their financial story. Our members see Empower Cash Advance as a life-saver, Empower Automatic Savings as a game-changer, and the new Empower Thrive line of credit (currently in beta, launching soon) as a lifeline to low-cost borrowing and the only practical path to building good credit.

Empower is backed by Sequoia Capital, Blisce, and Icon Ventures. Inc. ranked Empower #55 in the 2022 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. Fast Company recognized Empower Thrive in their 2022 list of the Next Big Things in Tech.

Want to make a difference in someone's journey to better credit? Let's go.

WHAT EMPOWER OFFERS

Competitive salary

Generous equity package

Full healthcare and dental 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.

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!