Compensation: $170k – $200k • 0.2% – 0.4%
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 Front-End Engineer to build the products that bring Backpack's payment infrastructure to life. You'll own our user-facing applications end to end - starting with two greenfield products, the Provider Portal and the Bursar Portal, which you'll help build from the ground up. You'll work directly with our founders and a tight engineering team to make critical product and technical decisions every week.
This isn't a "build me a website" role, and it isn't "take tickets off the board." You're a product builder. You'll shape what we build, how we build it, and how it feels to use - taking a problem that's 70% defined and owning it the rest of the way to a shipped product that customers love.
What you'll own and work on
- Build new applications from scratch. We're standing up the Provider Portal and the Bursar Portal as brand-new products - you'll architect and own them end to end, from the first commit to production.
- Build products, not pages. Design and ship interfaces that are a pleasure to use, grounded in a real understanding of the payment flows underneath them.
- Work fluently across the stack boundary. Integrate directly with our platform APIs and backend services, shape the contracts you consume, and hold your own in architecture and data-modeling discussions with backend engineers.
- Use AI to keep us lean. Lean on AI-assisted tooling and design patterns that minimize manual maintenance, so a small team can ship and operate a large surface area.
- Own quality end to end: performance, accessibility, reliability, and correctness in a regulated, money-movement environment where mistakes matter.
- Instrument what you ship - analytics, monitoring, and alerting - and use it to measure success in revenue and user love.
- Partner directly with founders, product, and customers - university business offices, scholarship providers, and student families - to turn ambiguous problems into shipped product.
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 professional (non-internship) experience in front-end development and web application development
- 5+ years of production level experience with JavaScript/Typescript, HTML, and CSS
- 5+ years of production level experience with modern JS frameworks such as React or Vue.js. (We use React and experience with React is preferred but not required)
- Experience with Postgres or other relational databases and comfortable writing SQL queries
- Proficient collaborating on API design and working with REST, and GraphQL APIs
- Experience with implementing testing strategies and coverage with modern front-end testing frameworks like Vitest, Jest, or Playwright
- Proficiency with version control systems such as Git
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a remote team via tools like Slack, Notion, and Linear
- Strong problem-solving skills with attention to detail
Nice to Have's
- Experience with Retool
- Knowledge of accessibility best practices and/or building accessibility compliant (a11y) web applications
- Experience with Node.JS, Next.js, Tanstack Start, and server side rendering (SSR)
- Experience with scaling front-end infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and front-end tooling like Vite
- Experience designing and/or wireframing in tools like Figma
- Comfortable using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform
- Experience working in Fintech, the financial services industry, or at early start up
Our Tech Stack
- Front-end: Typescript/JavaScript, React, Zustand, CSS, TailwindCSS, Vitest, and Vite
- Backend: Node.js, Postgres, Redis, Rails, Sidekiq
- Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD
- AI: Cursor and Claude, daily
- Security: AES-256 Encryption
Compensation and Benefits
Salary
The salary range for this role is $140,000 - $200,000
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 one of our co-founders (30-45 mins)
- Coding assessment with one of our engineers (~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.