The Petal mission

Petal’s mission is to expand access to opportunity, by making responsible, modern financial services available to everyone. Founded in 2016, Petal provides technology-enabled credit cards to consumers who are historically underserved by mainstream providers. 

Petal pioneered automated cash flow underwriting, a transformative new approach to assessing consumer creditworthiness with the potential to expand access to tens of millions of U.S. consumers without credit history, or for whom traditional credit scores do not tell the whole story. Petal pairs this groundbreaking, data-driven underwriting technology with a mobile-first, digitally native product experience designed to help users manage and build credit responsibly. For Petal, it’s a mission as much as it is a business—with a goal to reimagine finance for the next generation of consumers.

At Petal, we're looking for people with kindness, positivity, and integrity. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and potential will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. At Petal, we welcome diverse perspectives from people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions.

(Senior) Staff Engineer Role 

Staff engineers are responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. When needed they can dig deep into complex problems and find an appropriate path forward. Able to mentor and coach other engineers helping them learn and grow.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead critical projects and provide technical leadership in subject matter expertise.
• Own and drive cross-team engineering initiatives around technology, architecture, coding patterns, observability, testability, and more.
• Disseminate information across the organization, and have strategic influence.
• Collaborate with product managers, tech leads and other engineers to build a system that can scale as we grow 10x.
• Act as a bar raiser by mentoring and coaching more junior engineers.

Characteristics of a successful candidate:

• A customer-centric attitude and a true and honest desire to serve our customers first and above everything else. Everything we design, build, maintain ultimately serves our greater goal of making credit simple and accessible for everyone.
• 10+ years of experience - or equivalent proficiency - in designing, developing, testing, shipping, operating and scaling service-oriented/distributed applications or systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and holding technical presentations.
• Desire to dive deep into our current tech stack which includes Python, Flask, Postgres, Redis, Celery, Docker, Lambdas, Jenkins, and more.
• Strong ability to trace, debug, identify root causes of issues in a complex application flow, or a distributed transaction, and efficiently design, communicate, and implement elegant and resilient solutions for those problems.
• Strong sense of engineering pragmatism by being able to weigh technical debt against risk and business value when making daily decisions on how much or little to engineer a given feature or solution.
• Fluency and proactivity in team code reviews of any size with a critical eye for spotting issues and improvement opportunities from the lowest to the highest level.
• Impeccable ability to dive into a requirement’s details, no matter how ambiguous, taking apart a problem case by case, and asking the right questions to fill in any missing details or provide clarity around its value proposition and alignment.
• A humble thought leader and strong team-player, willing to pair, share, collaborate, assist, coach, and empathize with your teammates.
• Proactive -- unassuming that someone is doing something about a problem that is visible to you. As a small company you are encouraged and recognized when communicating issues and taking the initiative to correct problems.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in FinTech, consumer lending, or other regulated industries.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to building a team culture that celebrates diversity and inclusion. We’re proud to be different, together.

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