Staff Software Engineer

Meadow is the modern payments platform for higher education that simplifies the entire student financial experience. We're transforming the $600 Billion higher education payments industry in the United States — building for universities what Shopify built for retail businesses, and bringing the entire student financial experience online.

The need for a platform like Meadow has never been greater. If you're passionate about our mission to empower students financially and strengthen economic mobility through higher education — and you're excited to join a highly ambitious, talented team — we'd love to hear from you.

Meadow is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale our student financial engagement platform, Meadow Pay. As we continue expanding to universities nationwide, this role will be critical in delivering reliable, scalable product experiences for our institutional partners and their students.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate core systems across our backend and frontend stack, partnering closely with Product, CX, and Integrations to deliver high-quality software. This role requires strong technical judgment, a high bar for quality, and a desire to take ownership of meaningful product areas from concept through production.

AI tooling (e.g. Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc.) is a core part of how our team works and ships code every day. We're looking for a Software Engineer who is excited to use AI as a core part of their workflow. The ideal candidate should have experience building products in a way that AI tooling can efficiently understand context and collaborate with the user.

This is a full-time position reporting to Mike, Meadow's Engineering Manager.

• You'll lead end-to-end development of product features from design through deployment and ongoing support.

• You'll architect and build scalable backend services and APIs (TypeScript/Node.js).

• You'll contribute to frontend development using modern frameworks (React preferred).

• You'll design systems with reliability, observability, and maintainability in mind.

• You'll collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, CX, and Integrations teams to deliver customer-facing functionality.

• You'll participate in code reviews and uphold high standards for code quality and system design.

• You'll improve engineering processes, tooling, and documentation to support scale.

• You'll help shape technical decisions and engineering culture as we grow.

• 10+ Years of Experience in Product Engineering

  • You have experience building and operating production systems at scale.

• Ownership

  • Builder Mindset: You demonstrate High Agency x High Urgency.

    • You own problems end-to-end.

    • You make consequential decisions that impact outcomes.

  • Agency: You make significant decisions across projects and act on them without waiting for consensus. You are comfortable committing under uncertainty and getting others moving.

  • Decisions: You make high-stakes calls that hold up over time. You are the person others trust to be right for big technical decisions.

  • Operational Excellence: You drive sweeping improvements to stability/performance/scalability of business-critical systems and raise the operational bar for other engineers.

• Product Sense

  • Empathy: You understand users broadly and deeply, across segments and personas, internal and external alike. You anticipate needs users have not voiced yet and see how those needs are changing over time, not just what they want today.

  • Creativity: You generate original solutions to open, ambiguous problems, grounded in what is technically feasible. You use deep technical insight to spot approaches others miss, including what is newly possible, and frame options that are both inventive and buildable.

  • Taste: You hold the quality bar high across the full stack, from how systems are designed to how the experience feels for users, internal and external.

• Technical Depth

  • Design & Architecture: You make elegant decisions that reduce complexity and scale across multiple components. You make design choices that make whole categories of bugs, outages, and scaling problems impossible.

  • Problem Solving: You connect the dots to solve problems that span multiple, distant components, seeing the links others miss. You are the trusted person on hard, cross-cutting problems.

  • Tooling & Verification: You set the verification and eval bar that makes high-speed, agent-driven change safe.

  • Tech Debt: You spot architectural debt that constrains multiple pods, sequence the multi-cycle plan to remove it, and set the standards that keep it from re-accumulating.

• AI Fluency

  • You default to AI-first approaches where appropriate and have built workflows, tooling, or practices that improve output beyond just themselves.

  • You demonstrate strong judgment about tradeoffs and failure modes by choosing tools intentionally, validating outputs, and building review, testing, or mitigation into the workflow.

• Communication & Collaboration

  • You facilitate cross-pod discussions and guide hard debates to consensus — then clearly back the decision, even when it isn't your first choice.

  • You work fluidly across Product, Design, CX, and Sales, reaching to functions further from Engineering to align on direction.

• Experience at an Early Stage Startup (Seed, Series A, Series B)

• Experience in FinTech (Or Other Regulated Industries)

• Experience as a People Manager and/or Technical Lead

We are a distributed team with offices in New York, NY and San Mateo, CA. For this role, we're currently seeking candidates based in the United States.

Please note that Meadow does not currently offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Meadow wants all employees to be supported in their personal and professional development, so we take a comprehensive approach to compensation and benefits.

The initial annual salary for this position is expected to range from $185,300-$276,000. Actual compensation will depend on numerous factors such as: experience, knowledge and skills, qualifications, location, and other job-related factors.

In addition to the chance to positively impact the world while building a company around a $600B opportunity, Meadow offers:

• Competitive Salary

• Competitive Equity

• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

• Subsidized Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance (with HSA & FSA Plans Available)

• Flexible Paid Time Off

• Paid Company Holidays

• Paid Parental Leave

• 1-2 Onsites Per Year

• Membership in an Ambitious, Kind, No-Drama Team

We believe in hiring resourceful, curious people who are eager to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with the job description, we encourage you to go ahead and apply. You may be just the right candidate for this role.

Meadow is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in all its forms, and we encourage our employees to participate as their authentic selves in our work environment. We strive to build better for all, towards a more open, inclusive space. Come as you are.