Member of Technical Staff (Backend)

We're building Percy, the AI agent that runs financial crime investigations end to end.

Compliance teams at banks and fintechs are drowning in financial crimes investigations. Transaction volumes are surging, regulators keep raising the bar, and the work still runs on manual review queues that take hours and are stitched together from legacy vendors. We believe AI will make most of these decisions within a few years, so we built Percy to handle them. Percy learns each team's procedures and makes the same calls their analysts would: clearing false positives, escalating real risk, writing the case narrative, and documenting every decision for audit. It cuts review workloads by 70%+ and routinely catches fraud that human reviewers miss.

Percy is only possible because of the identity platform we've spent four years building underneath it. Because we own the entire identity flow, Percy resolves ambiguity at the source, running its own checks across our verification tools before a case ever reaches a human.

We're backed by QED, Index, Box Group, and Lerer Hippeau, and trusted by companies like Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. We 5x'd revenue last year and plan to do it again in 2026. The team is small, senior, and ships fast.

The Role

We're looking for a backend engineer who cares deeply about building secure, scalable systems to own the APIs and services that power it. You'll design and ship the infrastructure behind identity verification and Percy for millions of users, own large product areas end-to-end, and help set the technical direction of the platform.

This is a high-ownership seat on a small, senior team. You'll have real architectural authority from day one, and your judgment will shape what we build, not just how. You'll report directly to the Head of Engineering.

What You'll Own

• API and service design: Design and build high-performance, well-structured APIs and services that power the Footprint platform and the products our customers depend on.

• End-to-end delivery: Work closely with design and frontend engineers to take features from ideation through production, owning the backend from data model to deployment.

• Large product areas: Own significant features and entire product areas completely. You'll be trusted to make the architectural calls, not just implement them.

• Product direction: Be a strong contributor to overall product direction and team planning. Your judgment shapes what we build, not only how we build it.

• Rust at scale: Write production Rust for systems that handle sensitive data securely, reliably, and fast.

Must-Have

• Production backend experience at scale: You've designed, built, and operated real backend systems under load, and you've debugged them when things broke.

• Security-first mindset: You care about privacy, security, and trust, and it shows in how you architect and operate systems.

• Strong systems thinking: You design for scalability and security from day one, not as an afterthought, and you reason clearly about tradeoffs.

• Sweats the details: You think hard about edge cases, failure modes, and the not-happy path, because in our domain the details are the product.

• Bias to action: You move quickly yet diligently, aren't afraid to make and own mistakes, and get things shipped.

• Low ego, high ownership: You thrive in a high-trust environment where everyone pulls their weight and the best idea wins.

Nice-to-Have

• Familiarity with the KYC and identity verification space.

• Background with real-world cryptography or systems security.

• Production experience with Rust, or strong systems experience and a real desire to learn it.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure at scale: AWS and Pulumi.

• Experience designing APIs or SDKs used by external developers.

Stack

Rust, Python, Postgres, Pulumi, AWS

Success Looks Like

• 90 Days: You've shipped meaningful API or infrastructure improvements, demonstrated ownership of a product area, and built trust with the team through reliable delivery.

• 1 Year: You've architected and delivered major platform capabilities, become a go-to person for system design decisions, and elevated the team's engineering standards.

Why Join Footprint

• Massive impact, fast: You'll work on projects that shape company direction, not analysis that gets shelved.

• Own meaningful work: From day one, you'll have direct ownership over strategic initiatives that drive the business forward.

• Real growth opportunity: Promotion timelines depend on performance: the harder you work, the quicker you'll get promoted.

• Winning team and culture: We're a fast-moving, no-BS team that likes to win (and have fun doing it).

Benefits

• 💰 Generous compensation and equity packages

• 🍽 Free lunch and dinner (after 7pm)

• 💪 Monthly wellness stipend

• 🏖 Unlimited PTO

• 🏥 Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance

• 🚀 The chance to help shape the future of internet identity and financial crime prevention