Senior Backend Engineer

What is Spade?

Financial institutions process billions of transactions every day across cards, ACH, wires, and third party aggregators. But most of that data is difficult to use. Descriptions are inconsistent, merchant names don’t match, and categories vary by payment type.

Spade’s API takes these raw, messy transactions, and in <50 ms, returns clean, structured records linked to verified businesses in our proprietary database. Customers including Stripe, FIS, Bilt, Corpay, and Mercury use Spade to authorize more transactions, personalize experiences, power rewards programs, and more. We lead the market in terms of merchant coverage, speed of enrichment, and data accuracy, and enrich hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume every month.

Spade is a fast growing, Series A company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). We’re a lean and execution oriented hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of opinion, background, and experience. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you do?

• Collaborate on our technical vision to build a product customers love


• Develop and maintain low-latency, massively-scalable developer facing APIs and a robust data platform supporting our data science team


• Continuously improve our engineering best practices by designing and implementing systems that allow us to expand the code base, drive productivity, and scale the team


• Debug production issues across all levels of the stack


• Bring a strong collaborative approach to deliver value to customers and internal stakeholders at Spade

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary?

• This position is remote friendly (with an option to come to an office if in the NYC area), but only open to applicants based in the United States and Canada.


• Must-have:
  
  
  
  • 5+ years of experience building and scaling backend Python-based systems in fast-paced environments
  
  
  • Proven expertise in at least two of the following areas: infrastructure, data pipelines, and API development
  
  
  • Experience building systems from scratch, making trade-offs, and executing autonomously in early-stage environments
  
  
  • Product mindset and strong problem solving skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and focus on delivering customer value
  
  
  • Collaborative working style, fostering a culture of mentorship, shared success, and continuous improvement
  
  


• Nice-to-have:
  
  
  
  • Proficiency in Django and SQL
  
  
  • Familiarity with data science and analytics tools such as Pyspark, Databricks and Delta Lake, and Looker
  
  
  • Experience with cloud infrastructure and tools like AWS CDK
  
  
  • Experience with transaction, merchant, and/or location data
  
  
  • Experience and/or interest in fintech and/or data products
  
  

Why join Spade?

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture.


• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside.


• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. The future of finance will be built on better data, and Spade powers that. You’ll have the opportunity to drive impact at scale, helping industry leaders build more innovative products and services for consumers.

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package


• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees


• Life & short-term disability insurance


• Unlimited PTO


• 401K for retirement planning


• Remote-friendly team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC


• Paid parental leave


• Work from home stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

As part of our commitment to health and safety, Spade requires employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as permitted under applicable law.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team.


• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity.


• The anticipated cash salary range for this role for candidates based in the United States is between $180,000 and $210,000 USD, with an equity grant.