Role description
EarninABOUT EARNIN
As one of the first pioneers of earned wage access, our passion at EarnIn is building products that deliver real-time financial flexibility for people living paycheck to paycheck. Our community members access their earnings as they earn them, with options to spend, save, and grow their money without mandatory fees, interest rates, or credit checks. We’re fortunate to have an incredibly experienced leadership team, combined with world-class funding partners like A16Z, Matrix Partners, DST, Ribbit Capital, and a very healthy core business with a tremendous runway. We’re growing fast and excited to bring on world-class talent to help shape the next chapter of our growth journey.
EarnIn is becoming an AI-native company, embedding AI agents into how we build, analyze, and operate across every function. Teams use AI Agents to move from ideas to execution faster. By letting agents handle repetitive tasks, our people can focus on judgment, creativity, and hard problems. We pair this experimentation with the strict review and security guardrails our regulated financial environment requires, always keeping a focus on privacy and the people who rely on our products.
As a company, we are becoming AI-native, and we encourage you to use AI tools throughout much of your interview process. If you use AI during the live interview, just say so; a quick, natural mention of how it helped and why you are using it is all we need. What we're evaluating is your judgment, reasoning, and ability to own and defend your work, not whether AI was involved. Some rounds, particularly those focused on your career history and past experiences, will not allow the use of AI, and we'll let you know of those in advance. When in doubt, ask your recruiter or interviewer directly.
POSITION SUMMARY
EarnIn's marketplace business unit is focused on helping members earn rewards, save on everyday spending, and build credit through products like Rent Reporting. It is one of our fastest-growing revenue lines, and its platform for partner integrations, rewards, and ranking is reused across the company. You'll lead a full-stack team including staff-level tech leads that pioneered AI-native, spec-driven development at EarnIn.
You’ll bring a product-minded approach, using member and partner data to shape what the team builds, while helping partners launch faster and keeping high-traffic, critical-path services reliable.
The Mountain View base salary range for this full-time position is $266,793-$326,081, plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. This hybrid position in Mountain View requires 2 days of in-office work per week.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead, coach, and grow a team of backend and mobile engineers, including staff-level tech leads. Own the full performance cycle, from expectations and feedback to calibration, leveling, and development plans.
- Own hiring for the team: define roles, run interview loops, calibrate levels, and close candidates with full-stack range.
- Drive delivery: run the team's planning and sprint cadence, remove blockers, meet commitments on partner launches and platform work, and report status and risks to leadership.
- Partner with the GM to shape the quarterly roadmap: bring ideas grounded in member and partner data, size the ROI of competing work, and make scope trade-offs explicit.
- Measure the impact of what the team ships using experiments and business metrics such as conversion, partner revenue, and member engagement, and use the results to decide what to build next.
- Contribute to technical direction with staff engineers and architects, including design reviews, tech-debt prioritization, and build-vs-buy decisions across partner integrations, rewards, and ranking.
- Own operational health for a high-traffic service, including on-call, runbooks, ops reviews, and incident response.
- Coordinate your team's deliverables with Legal, Compliance, Finance, CX, and external partners on launches, and raise dependencies early.
- Champion AI-native engineering practices, including spec-driven development and agentic tooling, and coach engineers to use AI with rigor and judgment.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing a team of 5+ engineers, with experience hiring and developing them.
- Significant experience with backend services and distributed systems, including operating customer-facing services at high request volume, plus working knowledge of iOS or Android development.
- Experience delivering integrations with external partners, third-party APIs, or SDKs.
- Experience shipping products in a regulated environment alongside Legal, Compliance, or bank partners.
- Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools such as Cursor and Claude Code, with the judgment to apply them to planning, coding, triage, and technical decisions.
- Experience shaping what your team builds, not just how, using customer insight, experiments, and business metrics to set priorities and scope lean MVPs.
- Nice to have: experience with marketplaces, rewards or loyalty, ad-tech, payments, or experimentation, personalization, and ranking systems.
#LI-Hybrid
At EarnIn, we believe that the best way to build a financial system that works for everyday people is by hiring a team that represents our diverse community. Our team is diverse not only in background and experience but also in perspective. We celebrate our diversity and strive to create a culture of belonging. EarnIn does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, legally protected medical condition, family care status, military or veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws. EarnIn is an E-Verify participant.
EarnIn does not accept unsolicited resumes from individual recruiters or third-party recruiting agencies in response to job postings. No fee will be paid to third parties who submit unsolicited candidates directly to our hiring managers or HR team.