Staff Engineer, Backend

About Betterment:

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease.  We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays).

About the role

Broker Dealer is the core of the Betterment platform. On a busy day, we securely move millions of dollars through the Betterment system and ensure each transaction flows through a complex series of risk checks for strict regulatory compliance. Every ounce of efficiency and intelligence we pour into this system translates into more value for our customers. We’re looking for engineers to help us answer some of our most difficult backend scaling, software design, and optimization questions. As a Staff Engineer in our Broker Dealer organization, you'll help define our technical vision, improve system stability, drive on-time delivery, mentor our team of amazing engineers, and help scale our systems in the next chapter of our growth.

This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees. 

New York City: $210,000-245,000

This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

A day in the life

• Drive the technical vision and long-term strategy of the team
• Build innovative trading and money-movement technology that empowers people to make the most of their money, so they can live better
• Solve “impossible” problems. Take your ideas to the next level right away. We experiment, iterate, learn, and repeat
• Collaborate with purpose. Spread knowledge across the organization, leveling up engineering practices and mentoring other engineers
• Gain trust through transparency. We believe in taking the guesswork out of investing. That means a consistent experience for our customers — you’ll build the tools to make it possible
• Create efficiency. Our software helps customers save time and money. We maintain it through clean code, pragmatic programming, and lean engineering
• Work with people who care. Half of our team is made up of engineers but we believe everyone at Betterment is an engineer with their own tools. We’re a group of talented professionals who pride ourselves on what we do. We’re smart, innovative, energetic, and lots of fun

What we’re looking for

• 10+ years professional experience in at least one object-oriented language, strong plus for Java experience
• 7+ years professional experience with SQL and relational databases, including designing schemas and writing detailed SQL queries
• A strong command of fundamental algorithms and data structures
• Experience scaling and optimizing in large-scale distributed systems
• Experience designing, building, scaling, and maintaining core backend software components
• Proven ability to lead and manage projects that span one or more teams, considering tradeoffs to ensuring on-time delivery while maintaining high standards of quality, performance and security
• An understanding of how to make the tradeoffs required to ship without compromising quality
• Knowing that investments in developing solid tests pays for itself several times over
• Appreciation for agility and pragmatism in software development