Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Alt is unlocking the value of alternative assets, starting with the trading-card market, by enabling collectors to buy, sell, vault, and finance their cards in one place. The Staff Software Engineer will independently build and own the ledger, payment rails, reconciliation, payouts, lending infrastructure, and risk controls, with a focus on financial correctness, reliability, and responsible use of AI.
Responsibilities
- The ledger as system of record. Entries, lines, balances, holds, reversals, and the states between: pending, posted, available, canceled, declined, reversed. Immutability and audit trail as design constraints, not features. Point-in-time balances that show a customer where they stood on any past date. Done looks like an auditor pulling a trial balance without asking you for help
- Rails and money movement. ACH origination and returns, RTP and other instant rails, wires, cards, and stablecoin settlement. A credit-push rail changes what you can auto-charge and when funds are final, and you own those product consequences, not just the integration. Done looks like the fourth PSP costing a sprint, not a rewrite
- Reconciliation. When the ledger and the processor disagree, you own the answer. Automated matching, an exception queue a human can actually work, and breaks caught before a customer finds them. Every point of automation here is a point on the north star
- Payouts and lending infrastructure. Getting sellers and borrowers their money faster than anyone else in this market: instant payout options, batch payouts at auction close, and the settlement timing that makes them safe. Then the full loan lifecycle, disbursement through repayment, partial payment, delinquency, and collateral release
- Risk posture on high-value flows. Holds, limits, and settlement windows set with data, and you will know what each one costs in conversion. Step-up verification triggered by risk signals rather than blanket friction
- The trade-off calls. Shipping speed against uncompromising correctness, build against buy. You set the planning cadence with Robbe, you work across Finance, Risk, Ops, and Support, and you are the one who explains upward why a number moved
Skills
- You have owned a double-entry ledger in production. Built one, migrated one, or been the person accountable for one. You can explain a modeling decision you would make differently now, and why
- You have moved real money on real rails. ACH origination and returns, RTP or FedNow, wires, or equivalent. You know what an R01 is, why NACHA return windows matter, and why a credit-push rail changes the product flow and not just the API call
- You have handled large transactions, where the failure mode is a five- or six-figure problem and somebody notices immediately
- Database mastery. Expert SQL and relational design, and a transaction that holds under load at auction close and during scheduled auto-pay batches. Python, Postgres, and AWS are our stack
- You're API-native. Webhooks, idempotency, eventual consistency, and reconciliation are your default vocabulary, not terms you looked up
- You've built real things with AI, not just used it. Agents, skills, MCP servers, connectors, internal tooling people depend on
- Product-owner thinking. You don't just build a pay button. You understand the flow of funds and how to tell a worried customer what happened to their money
- Restraint. The most common way this seat fails is overengineering. You know when a queue and a lambda are the answer and when they are three new partial-failure modes
- Most people who clear this bar have five to ten years behind them, and we have no interest in screening out the person who got there faster
- US-based, remote
- Strong plus: enough React and TypeScript to ship the customer-facing surface that reads off your ledger. This is not a fullstack seat, but the person who can take a ledger change all the way to the UI will go further here
- Bonus: distributed systems, credit or risk modeling, direct experience with Stripe, Plaid, Airwallex, PayPal, Modern Treasury, or Increase, evaluating or implementing a third-party ledger service (Modern Treasury, Fragment, Formance, TigerBeetle or similar), stablecoin or on-chain settlement, KYC/KYB, bank partnership, or SOX and audit-readiness exposure. You collect, or you have a view on where this market is going
Benefits
- Equity for all full-time employees
- 85% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance, and up to 50% coverage for dependents
- HSA/FSA available
- Generous PTO that people actually take
- Parental leave at full salary
- $200/month wellness stipend
- $100/month home office stipend
- Free DoorDash Pass membership
- Remote-first (for most positions), with WeWork access when you want a room with other humans
- 401(k)
- Alt Equity to all full-time employees
Company Overview