Senior Software Engineer - Pricing

Upstart · Fintech · Remote · Engineering

Senior Software Engineer on the Core Pricing team at Upstart, focusing on evolving systems that power loan pricing. The role involves designing and implementing scalable, low-latency services that convert ML underwriting outputs into risk and profitability measures, and driving architectural improvements for the pricing platform. This is an engineering role that leverages AI outputs but does not build the core AI models themselves.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead the design and development of scalable, high-performance services that enable real-time pricing decisions across multiple products.
  2. Collaborate with data scientists and product managers to translate business goals into robust technical solutions.
  3. Drive architectural improvements in the pricing platform to support rapid growth, new products, and evolving modeling needs.
  4. Mentor and coach engineers across the team, elevating best practices in system design, testing, and operational excellence.
  5. Ensure the quality and reliability of our pricing engines through comprehensive testing, code reviews, and production monitoring.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of professional software development experience building scalable public or consumer-facing products.
  • High level of proficiency coding in production with Python, and some experience with Java or Kotlin or similiar.
  • Proven ability to independently own and deliver complex, multi-month engineering projects in fast-paced environments.
  • Experience designing and building scalable APIs and microservices in a cloud-based environment (AWS or GCP).
  • Strong problem-solving skills with an emphasis on scalability, performance, and system reliability.
  • Excellent communication skills, able to explain complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Demonstrated experience mentoring and coaching engineers, influencing technical direction, and raising the bar for the team.
  • Exhibits a bias for action and comfort navigating ambiguity while driving towards impactful outcomes.

Nice to have

  • Background in finance / fintech, financial mathematics, statistics, or machine learning preferred but not required
  • History of thriving in diverse work environments: both collaborative and self-directed; remote and in-person.
  • Deep experience with distributed systems, cloud-native development, and advanced CI/CD pipelines (infrastructure-as-code focus).
  • Recognized as a subject matter expert or technical owner for a critical domain, with a passion for sharing knowledge and best practices.
  • Active contributor to the tech community through open source, technical talks, or mentorship.

What the JD emphasized

  • scalable, low-latency services
  • real-time pricing decisions
  • evolving modeling needs

Other signals

  • ML underwriting outputs
  • real-time pricing decisions
  • scalable, low-latency services