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Software Engineer - Backend

Cardless · San Francisco · On-site

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About Cardless

Build credit into your product experience. Run it end to end with modular APIs, pre-built components, analytics, and full-service infrastructure. Backed by Pear VC.

About the role

As a Backend Engineer at Cardless, you'll work across the systems that run our partners' card programs: applications and underwriting, accounts and ledgers, transactions and payments, rewards, risk, and the APIs our partners build against. We keep this role deliberately general. There is more work than there are people, and the engineers who do best here are the ones who move to wherever the problem is. There are three kinds of work on our roadmap, and most people touch all three:

What they're looking for

  • Strong systems thinking and problem solving. You can reason about an unfamiliar system, find where it breaks, and make a sound call with incomplete information
  • Experience building and operating production backend services, with a track record of shipping projects end to end
  • Solid fundamentals in distributed systems, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
  • Proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem. We are primarily Java with Python for data work, and we do not expect you to have used ours
  • Clear communication and genuine care about correctness. A bug here means someone's card declines at the grocery store or their credit report is wrong
More about this role

Cardless is building the infrastructure for the world's best companies to design, build, and launch financial products of their own. Companies like Coinbase and Bilt use Cardless to create credit cards that feel entirely their own. In an industry where branded financial products usually mean shared logos and shared control, Cardless is built to disappear. Our APIs and components shape the journey from the first application to every purchase, reward, and moment of support that follows, while we handle lending, compliance, and operations behind the scenes.

In September 2025, we raised a $60 million Series C led by Spark Capital, bringing our total funding to $170 million. The team is over 70 people and scaling toward profitability by year-end 2026.

We're looking for kind, humble people with high standards and low egos. We take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. We see what could be improved, make it so, and leave every product, system, and team better than we found it.

As a Backend Engineer at Cardless, you'll work across the systems that run our partners' card programs: applications and underwriting, accounts and ledgers, transactions and payments, rewards,...

Read the full posting on Cardless's site ↗

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