Generalist Engineer

Full Time; SF-based

We enable payments without middlemen for everyone using our simple APIs. Calling our current financial system antiquated is an insult to the word 'antiquated'. Banks today still run on COBOL written in the 70s! Credit card payments still run on phone lines and require between 7-10 middlemen to process every single transaction! These legacy systems enrich the big banks and card networks at the expense of consumers and merchants, resulting in $29B in annual credit card fraud and exorbitant fees for merchants, just to name a few problems.

Zage builds APIs that enable online merchants process payments at the lowest fees, fastest processing times, and with no risk at all. Our infrastructure cuts out every single middleman and runs within the confines of regulations in the US. Zage is on a mission to make the exchange of value seamless and equitable for everyone.

We are looking for ambitious and passionate builders who can help us grow the company and grow with us. We are currently a team of four backed by Y Combinator, Silicon Valley Bank Capital, Human Capital, Addition, Quiet, Altman brothers, the Chainsmokers as well as early employees of Venmo, Coinbase and more!

🤩 You will

• Design, Build, and Maintain various web-based and mobile based applications, APIs, and SDKs.
• Work on stimulating and challenging technical problems around cost, efficiency, and risk of moving money through the US economy and build creative solutions to optimize the same

🪄 You have

• A strong technical background. No minimum work experience required but ideally 2-5 years.
• An ability to not only view our product from our users’ perspectives but also work with them to craft great developer and user relationships and experiences.
• An ability to wear multiple hats complemented by an ability to focus in on a single project when needed.
• A preference for simple solutions that can be implemented immediately with a good intuition for what is lasting and scalable.
• An interest in working at a < 10 person startup and taking high ownership of projects.
• A technical background in some of TypeScript, GCP, React, React Native, Kotlin, Swift, Open API, and Microservices.

🛠 Sample projects

• Building highly scalable and highly reliable APIs that move money in the real world.
• Building beautifully functional dashboards for our developers and enabling them to interact with our APIs, SDKs, and other products.
• Building intuitive APIs and SDKs for Swift, Kotlin, React Native, and more.
• Building highly effective deep neural networks to classify risk on different developers, users, and transactions.
• Building strong relationships with the developers to quickly and effectively iterate on the products from APIs to documentation.

Life at Zage

Here at Zage, we have a fundamental belief that the world is a beautiful and magical place but some things in it need to be fixed. Some of those things that need to be fixed require Herculean feats of strength, focus, and effort to remedy. We believe that the work is worth it and that’s what we’re doing. We happen to be starting with payments and banking because, without an effective financial ecosystem, it’s hard to do too much else.

🤞 Trust + Openness

It’s spending a lot of time a day together with not a lot of people but incredible people. Yes, you get co-workers but you truly get friends! The small team means sometimes it's okay to go play some basketball or go on a hike to get some fresh air over a long lunch break, but it also means some days we’re burning the midnight oil as if anything needs to get done, we’re the ones that have to do it.

👑 Ownership + Autonomy + Responsibility

Though support, training, and teamwork are always there, a lot of projects will require the individual team member to put the team on their back and spearhead an initiative. This results in proactive and deep-working people as often being the ones who thrive.

🚀 Infectious Ambition

Our aim isn’t to make a quick exit in a few years but to truly make an impact on the world over the next several decades. This means ambition in individual projects, ambition in the vision of Zage, and ambition in who you can be as a person. We are fundamentally trying to rebuild one of the oldest institutions in this world, and as such require an intense diversity of people, thinking, and skill sets. All are welcome as long as you can dream big.

Story of Zage

Our founder started a summer project during the COVID-19 lockdowns to help local businesses in Princeton with their cash flow problems. The concept was simple #SendNowSpendLater. The students of Princeton University would send money to local merchants, get 10-15% cash back, and spend the money using an app when the lockdowns open. The app was a total success with local businesses and students. But we ended up paying more than 10% in processing fees for every single transaction. The businesses that were already cash strapped couldn't have swallowed such obnoxious fees and we had to do better. Zage was born out of the first hand pain of trying to do good and trying to build extremely simple flow of funds. We not only helped local businesses stay afloat but also ended up building the most efficient embedded payments network company along the way.

Apply here

https://form.typeform.com/to/B2SJomI7