Staff Software Engineer

ENGINEERING BUSINESS UNIT OVERVIEW

The charter for Engineering group at Oportun is to be the world-class engineering force behind our innovative products. The group plays a vital role in designing, developing, and maintaining cutting-edge software solutions that power our mission and advance) our business. We strike a balance between leveraging leading tools and developing in-house solutions to create member experiences that empower their financial independence.

The talented engineers in this group are dedicated to delivering and maintaining performant, elegant, and intuitive systems to our business partners and retail members. Our platform combines service-oriented platform features with sophisticated user experience and is enabled through a best-in-class (and fun to use!) automated development infrastructure. We prove that FinTech is more fun, more challenging, and in our case, more rewarding as we build technology that changes our members’ lives.

Engineering at Oportun is responsible for high quality and scalable technical execution to achieve business goals and product vision. They ensure business continuity to members by effectively managing systems and services - overseeing technical architectures and system health. In addition, they are responsible for identifying and executing on the technical roadmap that enables product vision as well as fosters member business growth in a scalable and efficient manner.

POSITION OVERVIEW

The Staff Software Engineer role offers a unique opportunity to combine your technical expertise with strategic thinking, guiding the team in making architectural decisions, mentoring senior engineers, and actively contributing to the evolution of our technology stack. This role is the SME and “go-to” person in the team, and the individual works well under pressure, responds with urgency and operates with a high degree of autonomy, accountability and maturity. As a Staff Software engineer, you are the domain expert in multiple areas and can provide regular insight to product and design leads of all levels that are working within these areas. You can identify, tackle and deliver on strategically important problems for the group whether it is Product, Platform, or Infrastructure.

This role affords opportunities to lead and contribute to design and implementation of multiple large projects or lead a large org or company-wide objective, including the possibility of (technically) leading multiple small(er) teams, or a large team. Overall, this role has all the ingredients for the incumbent to command and hold respect as an expert and to develop a track-record of deep and/or broad impact to a product or technology area.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• You lead the end-to-end delivery of complex software applications, ensuring adherence to best practices and high overall quality standards.
• You create frameworks and abstractions that lessen the workload of other engineers. Your documentation and tutorials enable other teams to leverage your work independently. You identify and resolve improvements in test coverage for end-to-end business flows across multiple systems (and teams). You introduce new tools, techniques, and coding patterns to other engineers, some of which may be developed by yourself, and drive this change to other teams.
• You drive technical decision-making, contribute to, and sometimes lead, architectural discussions, and propose innovative solutions to address complex technical and/or systemic architectural challenges. You collaborate across teams and build systems to address architectural gaps.
• You take ownership of critical projects and initiatives, providing project leadership, and ensuring successful delivery through effective project management and communication. You engage with stakeholders across the group, understanding their needs and working through the complexity and conflicting goals.
• You have the ability to provide a clear and concise explanation of business strategy, technical concepts, designs or implementation to a non-technical audience. You collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and fellow engineers to gather and translate business requirements into efficient and scalable software solutions. You have a track record of leading cross-team efforts that deliver meaningful results across engineering, product, and/or design. You work through technical, organizational and scheduling complexity to align teams and deliver results in a positive way for the people and teams involved. Your interactions build trust and speed at scale into our organization.
• You are the technical thought leader of the team and provide necessary guidance and mentorship to senior team members whenever required.
• You play the key technical counterpart to an engineering manager with a larger team; you can provide effective feedback to engineering managers at all levels to identify and help address gaps in their teams.
• You successfully advocate for technologies and processes that make multiple teams more efficient.
• You conduct rigorous code reviews, offering valuable feedback to maintain code quality, performance, and maintainability.
• You continuously identify opportunities for process improvements and efficiency gains within the software development lifecycle.
• You stay informed about emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices, and proactively introduce relevant advancements to enhance our products and services.

REQUIREMENTS

• 10+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or a Master's degree with an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Proven track record of delivering sophisticated software solutions in a leadership capacity with high quality.
• Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with a passion for tackling complex technical and business problems. challenges.
• Mastery over data structures, algorithms, and software design principles.
• Demonstrated experience in web application development, Java, Micro services, Spring boot, Spring Framework, RESTful APIs, Hibernate
• Ability to quickly learn new systems/requirements and create POCs and develop code.
• Experience in relational databases like MySQL, MariaDB and SQL
• Solid grasp of version control systems, such as Git.
• Knowledge in OAuth2
• Proven ability to mentor and lead a team of engineers, fostering a collaborative and supportive work environment.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal abilities, with a track record of effectively collaborating in a team-oriented environment.
• Exposure to one of the cloud technologies - AWS/Azure/GCP

Desired:

• Experience with cloud technologies, preferably AWS or Azure, is highly desirable.
• Experience in automation with Web Driver IO
• Knowledge/experience in working with DevOps/CICD