Compensation: $170k – $220k • 0.1% – 0.5%
About Backpack
Backpack is building the financial infrastructure for the $1.8 Trillion higher education market.
We connect universities with everyone who pays them, reducing friction to make education more accessible and affordable. Our wedge is becoming the national clearinghouse for external payments in the US, starting with 529 plans, prepaid plans, scholarships, and third-party payers. From that foundation, we expand in two directions: becoming the universal payments API for education institutions, and ultimately the financial operating system that powers every dollar flowing in and out of an education institution.
A few things we’re proud of:
- Have built the first connected banking platform in higher education
- We are the largest digital disbursement network for outside scholarships in the US
- Early partners are some of the country’s largest universities, including The University of Alabama, The University of Chicago, Arizona State University and Miami University.
- Processing tens of millions in payment volume from thousands of external payees that include Fortune 500 companies, State and Federal Government Organizations, and some of the largest wealth management companies in the country.
- Raised $12M in venture funding from Walkabout Ventures, Mischief Ventures and Core VC, as well as founders and executives from Plaid, SoFi, Brex, Chime, Square and many others.
About the Team
We like to think we are an ambitious, creative and fun group all brought together through a shared mission of improving accessibility and affordability of education.
We extreme take pride in meeting and exceeding the set of standards we defined as a team:
- We obsess over crafting quality products and infrastructure
- We collaborate without ego
- We aim to raise the bar for our industry, users and team members every day
- We continuously enhance our payments network
- We are compassionately direct with each other and our partners
- We are blameless and accountable - a powerful combination
- Importantly, we have fun doing it.
The Role
We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own and evolve the core systems that power Backpack - our payment engine, platform APIs, and the infrastructure underneath it all. You'll work directly with our founders and a tight engineering team to make critical technical decisions every week.
This isn't a "take tickets off the board" role. You'll shape what we build, how we build it, and how we scale it.
What you'll own and work on
- Architect a modern financial infrastructure for external payments in Higher Education (seriously - everything is paper check today. You will build greenfield infra).
- Build and maintain critical infrastructure: payments, storage, networking, security, and observability systems
- Own core banking infrastructure, including direct integrations with the Federal Reserve and real-time payment networks
- Design and implement CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, and release engineering workflows
- Improve system resiliency and availability through better monitoring, testing, and automation
- Lead platform initiatives like integrations, authentication, AI tooling, new products etc.
- Optimize performance, reliability, and correctness across our systems
- Uphold the highest standards for system safety, especially in a regulated, mission-critical environment
What We're Looking For
You'll thrive here if these describe how you already work:
- Builder mentality: Strong opinions, weakly held. You default to shipping the smallest thing that works, then iterate fast. You'd rather have something in production learning from real usage than a perfect design doc collecting comments.
- Ownership > tasks: You proactively unblock yourself and others.. When something is unclear or broken, you prototype, reach out directly, pair, or just ship a pragmatic solution.
- Product-minded: You obsess over the "why" behind features. You dig into customer data and measure success in revenue and user love.
- AI-native: You already use Cursor, Claude, Junie, or similar every day. You treat AI as a pair programmer - not a novelty, but also not a replacement.
- Start-to-finish ownership: You love owning projects end-to-end, and always implement monitoring, set up alerting, watch the metrics, and make sure it accomplishes objectives.
- User-first: Every product decision should be made with the end user in mind. You build products that are a pleasure to use.
- Growth-driven: You're dedicated to your own growth and have the drive to continuously learn. You actively seek feedback and push yourself into uncomfortable territory.
- Customer-comfortable: You can talk to and work with customers of any kind - student families, university business offices, merchants - and put yourself in their shoes.
Your Experience
We recognize not everyone will meet all of the criteria. If you meet most of the criteria below and you're excited about the opportunity and willing to learn, we'd love to hear from you.
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years at a senior level, with a strong backend and product engineering background.
- Production experience with TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js. Ruby/Rails exp is a plus.
- Strong experience building and scaling backend systems, including APIs, data models, background jobs, and production services.
- Advanced working knowledge of Postgres and Redis.
- Experience owning systems end to end: technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
- Strong communication, prioritization, and project ownership skills, especially in a remote or hybrid team environment.
Nice to Have's
- Demonstrated success managing large-scale backend infrastructure and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Terraform, messaging queues, etc.) and CI/CD.
- Experience building applications from scratch.
- Domain knowledge in payment processing, identity/auth, or finance.
- Experience working in fintech, the financial services industry, or at early-stage startups.
Our Tech Stack
- Backend: Node.js, Postgres, Redis, Rails, Sidekiq
- Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD
- Front-end: TypeScript/JavaScript, React
- AI: Cursor and Claude, daily
- Security: AES-256 Encryption
Compensation and Benefits
Salary
The salary range for this role is $170,000 - $220,000
Equity
Competitive equity package
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision health care plans
- Health care FSA/HSA plans
- 401K
- PTO and 10+ public holidays
- Backpack Recharges — dedicated team time off to recharge
Location
New York City, NY or Austin, TX preferred (Hybrid — in-office 3-5 days).
Remote (within US) an option for exceptional candidates.
Interview Process
We value transparency. Here is what you can expect:
- Initial interview with the hiring manager or one of our co-founders (30-45 mins)
- Second interview with one of our co-founders (CEO/COO) or Staff Engineers (30-45 mins)
- Coding assessment — JavaScript/TypeScript + SQL (take-home or virtual, ~60 mins)
- Virtual onsite (or in-person), including:
- Technical interviews (coding and system design)
- Meeting the rest of the Backpack team
- Reference calls (we'll ask for 2 references with at least one being a direct manager)
Accommodations
We are committed to providing an accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations at any point, please let us know and we'll work with you.
We Look Forward to Hearing from You!
We cannot wait to hear from passionate, driven, and talented people who are excited about our mission. We're building a first-of-its-kind fintech company to completely revolutionize an entire asset class and, eventually, how all Americans pay for their education. We acknowledge this is a big ask list - if there are a couple of missing pieces, we strongly urge you to still apply.