Senior Principal Engineer

Millions in the U.S. continue to be underserved or ignored by traditional financial institutions. At Stash, an investing app for more than 2 million active subscribers, we are addressing that reality by giving everyday Americans the confidence to take charge of their money and financial future. Our plans—starting at just $3 a month—provide easy and affordable access to a suite of products including investing, banking, education, and advice. Stashers are 18% more financially literate than the average American, and customers rely on Stash’s unique tools, guardrails, and content to learn about money and build wealth for the long-term. 

In 2022, we made tremendous steps forward in the Stash customer experience, through the launches of Stash Core, a new banking account experience featuring access to an upgraded Stock-Back® Debit Mastercard®, enhanced customer support, and refreshed benefits, including increased rewards; and expanded access to cryptocurrency through a separate crypto account offering. 

Our Talented Team 

We are proud to attract phenomenal individuals who share our commitment to unlocking financial opportunity for a new generation of investors. Their unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences have helped create a thriving and inclusive culture based on the notion of “Prioritizing People,” a Stash core value.  

Let’s solve complex problems and tackle wealth inequality.

We are seeking a Senior Principal Engineer with a passion for building customer-centric, reliable, scalable, and performant software. In this role, you will provide strategic technical guidance for your Engineering Organization and fellow Principal Engineer cohort, with a focus on simplicity, scalability, problem solving and successful delivery.  Our ideal candidate will add a technical, mentoring, and mission-driven presence across the broader organization and partner with colleagues to help lead our software engineering efforts. We place great value on cross-functional collaboration skills. In this role, you will support and mentor engineers with technical guidance and work with the VP of Engineering to continually improve processes around technical direction, architecture scalability, and ongoing engineering innovation. A strong track record of building and scaling high-performing engineered systems is preferred.

What You’ll Do

TECHNOLOGY AND EXECUTION

• Frame and define high-level engineering initiatives
• Work with teams and stakeholders to ensure clear requirements and deadlines
• Guide engineering teams to continuously improve, meet deadlines, and consistently deliver high-quality software
• Work with the team’s engineers to solve a class of highly technical problems including:
  • Architecture and design
  • Code and code patterns, API design
  • Testing and code quality
  • Reliability, scalability and security
  • Infrastructure development and cloud cost management
• Work with peers and senior leadership to standardize and evolve engineering architecture and best practices

DEVELOP LEADERS

• Establish clear goals and standards for senior engineers to promote a culture of ownership; coach and develop these leaders
• Lead technical initiatives and projects, providing technical guidance, direction, and mentorship to team members
• Mentor and sponsor engineers; participate in programs for engineering growth
• Mentor and develop engineers to confidently and capably perform incident management activities in support of our internal SLOs
• Mentor and teach engineers to operate independently and own their technical decisions

DEVELOP TEAMS

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive technical innovation and establish technical vision and strategy
• Build and foster a culture of “engineering excellence,” “operational excellence,” “customer obsession,” and ownership
• Build strong working and collaborative relationships with senior leadership and senior engineers
• Help develop and evangelize a strong engineering culture including influence across the wider engineering organization
• Develop and maintain technical roadmaps, ensuring alignment with business goals and objectives

DEVELOP SYSTEMS

• Research and develop new technologies, identifying opportunities for improvement, and ensuring adherence to industry standards and best practices
• Maintain awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices, and provide guidance and recommendations to senior engineers and stakeholders
• Facilitate communication and collaboration between our engineering teams and the rest of the organization
• Ensure the quality and performance of technical systems and solutions, identifying and resolving technical issues and risks
• Document, socialize, and champion adherence to best practices
• Lead technical discussions, presentations, and workshops, communicating complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders

What We’re Looking For

INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• 4+ years of hands-on technical leadership and Architecture experience
• BS/MS in Computer Science or relevant industry experience
• Highly proficient technical knowledge of current tools and best practices at scale
  • Deployment
  • Monitoring and alerting
  • Logging
  • Cloud services/infrastructure
  • Incident management
  • Backend RESTful APIs
• Proven ability and experience developing technical leaders
• Proven ability to successfully execute against strategy in partnership with other functions including Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience, Finance, and Leadership.

INTERPERSONAL TRAITS

• Commitment to excellence and alignment with the value/goals of what we’re building for customers
• Entrepreneurial and mission-focused mindset
• Player-coach who can jump in and do and ignite the team around an effort and release
• Data-driven decision maker, willing to take risks, fail fast, and iterate quickly
• Strong communication skills to effectively and transparently communicate and mobilize all levels and functions of Stash.
• 360 view and understanding of product development lifecycle and customer experience
• Being personable, approachable, professional and inclusive
• Security focused with a view of security embedded in the SDLC and each release

Gold Stars

• Experience building applications at scale
• Experience managing engineering teams
• Experience transitioning monolithic systems to distributed solutions
• Experience building internet-scale consumer application platforms. Better: app platforms within the FinTech domain.
• A keen understanding of testing best practices (TDD is a plus!)
• Familiarity with or interest in our AWS-based stack: Ruby on Rails, Go, Kotlin, Sidekiq, Postgres, Redis, Scala
• Familiarity with or interest in front-end technologies: Swift, Kotlin, React.js
• Familiarity with financial security and privacy issues, as well as regulatory frameworks in the banking and financial services industry

#LI-MN1

#LI-REMOTE

At Stash it is our mission to help everyday Americans invest and build wealth. That includes people of all races,  genders, and abilities, so it is important to us to acknowledge and address the issues of inequality in financial services head on. 

Diversity and inclusion are essential to living our values, promoting innovation, and building the best products. Our success is directly related to our employees and we believe that our team should reflect the diversity of the customers that we serve.  As an Equal Opportunity Employer, Stash is committed to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds.

If you require any reasonable accommodations to make your application process more accessible please reach out to recruiting@Stash.com. 

Helping You Invest in Yourself 

• Comprehensive total rewards package, comprising compensation (base salary, equity, and depending on level, an annual bonus) and health care benefits 
• Complimentary subscription to Stash+ account 
• Remote-first work policy – Live and work where you feel the most productive, whether that is in your home, in an office (including our NYC and London offices), or a combination of both. Anywhere in the US or UK.  
• Equity & Stash Accounts [Invest, Retire, Custodial, Bank]                     
• Flexible PTO 
• Annual education reimbursement benefit Learning & Development Fund 
• Work from home equipment stipends
• Paid Parental Leave ([offerings for birth giving and non-birth giving parents) Primary & Secondary]
• Enhanced wellness benefits through Gympass, Headspace, Ginger, and Maven Health
• Stash Gives donation and volunteerism program through Millie, with an annual company match

External Recognition for Stash

• Comparably’s Best Company Awards: Best Places to Work, Best Company Outlook, and Best Engineering Team for Diversity, Women, Culture, and more! (2023)
• Fintech Breakthrough Award: Best Personal Finance App (2023)
• BuiltIn’s Best Places to Work (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022)
• Forbes Fintech 50 (2019, 2020, 2021)
• Best Digital Bank, Finovate Awards (2020)
• Tearsheet Challenge Awards, Best Banking Card Product - Stock-Back® Card, 2020
• LendIt Fintech Innovator of the Year (2019 & 2020)

**No recruiters, please**