Software Engineer, Foundations

Upstart Upstart · Fintech · Remote · Engineering

Upstart is a fintech company that uses AI to improve access to credit. The Foundations team builds and maintains large-scale data platforms for marketing initiatives, focusing on audience segmentation, campaign enablement, and attribution systems. This role involves scaling and extending backend data systems and pipelines to support marketing data workflows, partnering with stakeholders to improve data availability, maintainability, and observability, and contributing to data quality through monitoring and validation.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and maintain scalable backend systems and data pipelines that support audience segmentation and marketing attribution workflows
  2. Partner with product managers, marketers, and engineers to deliver data solutions that support customer acquisition and conversion goals
  3. Extend existing data infrastructure to support increasing data volumes, evolving business requirements, and new integrations
  4. Contribute to data quality initiatives by implementing monitoring, validation, and guardrail mechanisms across critical datasets
  5. Participate in technical discussions around architecture, access patterns, and platform scalability to support long-term platform growth

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) plus 3 years of software engineering experience
  • 3+ years of experience building and maintaining backend distributed systems or large-scale data platforms
  • Experience working with data processing systems, databases, or data pipelines in production environments
  • Experience implementing fault tolerance, monitoring, and observability practices for backend systems
  • Experience collaborating cross-functionally with engineering, product, or business stakeholders to deliver technical solutions

Nice to have

  • Knowledge of data modeling and schema design best practices for large-scale data systems
  • Experience supporting marketing technology, attribution, or customer segmentation platforms
  • Familiarity with data governance, privacy, and PII security considerations
  • Ability to balance short-term feature delivery with long-term platform maintainability and scalability
  • Experience contributing to architectural discussions and improving engineering best practices across teams

What the JD emphasized

  • backend distributed systems
  • large-scale data platforms
  • data processing systems, databases, or data pipelines
  • fault tolerance, monitoring, and observability practices
  • data modeling and schema design best practices
  • data governance, privacy, and PII security considerations