Principal Backend Developer

About Gerald

Paying bills sucks. It sucks even more for about a third of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, and struggling to pay bills on time. About 100 million Americans are at risk of paying overdraft fees if they auto-pay their bills, and are forced to manually log into and pay up to 10 biller accounts each month. Why are so many people wasting their time and energy manually paying bills to avoid overdraft fees? Because they are not using Gerald!

Gerald is a Y Combinator-backed technology company based in New York. Our platform combines fintech, payments, and big data to create an empowering and rewarding user experience for making timely bill payments.

Read more about us here →

Our mission

Gerald is on a mission to eliminate stress about paying bills. Gerald provides consumers with overdraft and late fees protection for their household bills. We are transforming bill payments by providing consumers with an application for linking and automatically paying biller accounts. Our app tracks and pays bills so our users don’t have to. We offer banking services; direct deposits, credit building, cash advance and rewards to simplify bill payments for both billers accounts and consumers.

❓ Role Summary

As a backend software developer, you will be producing scalable software solutions and will also be responsible for keeping the platform and data service running. You will drive and implement new requirements and improvements into the product, including new feature requests, integrating new technologies into the service, and resolve or mitigate commonly hit operational issues. If you are passionate about solving crucial business problems and enjoy working on them in a small, fast-paced team, this may be for you. • Skills: Node.js (Express), TypeScript, and PostgreSQL with AWS as the primary cloud provider.

⚡ What you'll do

• Lead an engineering solution to a business problem end-to-end, and communicate it to engineers and management • Find scalable solutions to challenging technical problems while working through the application development lifecycle to launch • Implement high performance pipelines with Node.js, Docker and lots of other modern tools—we are heavy users of AWS • Develop and design scalable RESTful services and APIs • Develop and manage well-functioning databases and back end applications • Leading and developing best practices for the Engineering team and finding the best tools for the job at hand • Since we’re always deploying, you will help us move faster and guide our engineering and product • Partner with the product leadership to ensure the work we do has impact with our customers • Create security and data protection settings • Write technical documentation • Keeping current with industry trends and developments that can be applied to company needs

🎯 What we're looking for

• 10+ years of engineering experience on backend systems • Strong knowledge of building effective APIs in Node.js (Express) • Strong experience working with any SQL databases, such as PostgreSQL • Experience with deploying solution using Docker containers • Professional experience with TypeScript • Leading engineering teams from business use case, requirements, and delivery of end product • Significant experience designing and implementing fault-tolerant, data-intensive services • Significant experience testing and deploying systems to production • Experience with large-scale event processing pipelines, preferably using streaming technologies • Experience in FinTech space is a super plus! • Working experience with AWS is desirable • Good knowledge of data structures, system design and algorithms • Bachelor/Master degree in Computer Science

🤗 Who you are

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong attention to detail
• Head for problem-solving
• Having a flexible working style
• Being a team player
• Comfortable with working unsupervised

📐 Why Gerald?

1. Huge opportunity. About a third of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and are struggling to pay their bills on time. About 100 million Americans are at risk of paying overdraft fees if they auto-pay their bills. We have the ability to help a lot of people profitably.
2. Challenging problems. With every single customer that we onboard, it means we are dealing with millions of data records. The challenge is to scale up the product to handle so much data and process it efficiently, while taking all measures to ensure the security of the data. The goal is to make our system learn as quickly as possible so that it can give very accurate predictions when making suggestions related to consumers.
3. A great team. Our founding team has deep expertise in financial services, product engineering, data science, and machine learning, as well as degrees from MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, and Yale. We try to take a scientific, data-driven approach whenever possible.
4. Culture. Having worked at high growth, early stage startups in the past, our team understands the value of work-life balance. We take weekends off and go on paid vacations.
5. Resources and growth. We're well capitalized with seed funding and are backed by Y Combinator and other top tier investors. We keep a lean team, and this is a rare opportunity to join us - you'll learn a lot, build cool products, and grow as our company scales!

🙌 What we offer

• Flexible working hours
• Generous paid vacation
• Work from home opportunity
• Opportunity as one of our first hires to take on significant responsibility and ownership in your department that will have a huge impact on the growth of the company