Lead Backend Engineer

About Prodigal

We are a fast-growing Bay Area-based startup backed by leading investors like Menlo Ventures, Accel and Y-Combinator. In the past year we grew revenue nearly 10x and recently raised a series A from a top-tier Silicon Valley venture fund. We are looking to continue to grow aggressively and are hiring stellar Backend Engineer to drive our next phase of growth.

Our core product offering helps automate lending operations for financial services firms across the lending value chain. The Prodigal team has deep technical talent today and we believe there is an opportunity to build an iconic vertical software business that will fundamentally impact how the multi-trillion-dollar debt industry is managed. Debt has such a massive impact on consumers and prior to Prodigal, the industry was saddled with painful, low value manual workflows, and poor customer experience- our mission is to humanize the debt repayment process through automation and data.

🏆 What will you be doing

• O(n) O(nice). Build and maintain responsive, highly scalable APIs that power our web application as well as end-user accessible direct API endpoints.

• Do that, but also in real time. Scale up and maintain mission-critical real-time infrastructure that supports our real-time suite of products.

• Engineer the heck out of it. Design and implement databases and other associated storage and indexing systems for high performance of our applications while maintaining efficient compute and storage usage.

• Break it down. Work actively with Product Managers to understand, design and lay down detailed specs for new product feature.

• Start With Good, Make it Better. Conduct detailed code reviews to help maintain a high quality of R&D and production code; actively refactor the existing code base with a view to reduce technical debt and upgrade to latest best practices.

• Lead. Participate actively in the hiring process and also mentor junior colleagues to build a top quality engineering team.

• New update available. Stay informed on new, relevant technologies and test the promising ones with a view to use state-of-the-art components throughout the backend tech stack.

🔍 What we look for

• Passion for the topic. You have a long-standing, proven passion for writing software. The ideal candidate has 4+ years of experience building production-grade backend applications using Python. It’s a big plus if you have a demonstrable interest in developing tools, complex backends, or infrastructures. Node.js experience would be appreciated as well.

• Reasoning and depth of learning. You’re structured and creative enough to solve most challenging problems independently, given the necessary knowledge. You learn new concepts and skills rapidly, and love to nerd out. Deep expertise in Python and NoSQL databases with working knowledge of relational DBs.

• Fully loaded toolkit. Our choice of cloud service provider is AWS. So working knowledge of core AWS services is essential. Experience with Docker and Kubernetes is a big plus.

• Drive. You’re energetic, hard-working, and persevere through adversity until the job is done - and done impeccably. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and at the same time don't let good enough stop you in the pursuit of excellence.

• Pragmatism. Far from being too academic or obsessive in your perfectionism, you understand that, when getting things done in a competitive world, speed is often as important as quality.

• Diligence, organization. You can be entrusted with responsibilities big and small.

🎁 What we offer

• Cool tech stack. We strive to use the best, most modern tools and technologies, and when they fall short of our expectations we invent our own.

• Health insurance. Health always comes first. The health of your family is as important to us, as it is to you. We offer insurance coverage for both you and your family.

• Talented, knowledgeable colleagues. You’ll get the chance to learn from (and teach) some of the brightest and most skilled people you’ll ever meet. Your talent is going to blossom here.

• Continuous education. As relentless seekers of knowledge, we sponsor and support any training materials, books, courses, exam fees for upskilling yourself in areas related to your role - but that's not where it ends. If you make a good case for some extra learning, we're delighted to foot the tab.

• Flexible schedule. We're not a "clock in, clock out" company. Morning person? Start work while the world’s still sleeping. Night owl? Ramp things up while others are winding down. You’re fully trusted to create the right conditions for your own personal peak productivity. We only ask that you’re available to your teammates for a good chunk of the day.

• Generous leave policy. Take all the time you need to recharge your batteries - no permission process or vacation allowance here. Because a rested, relaxed, and refreshed mind is a happy and effective mind.

From day 1, Prodigal has been defined by talented, humble, and hungry leaders and we want this mindset and culture to continue to blossom from top to bottom in the company. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to work in a fast-paced, intellectually-stimulating environment where you will be pushed to grow, then please reach out because we are looking to build a transformational company that reinvents one of the biggest industries in the US.