What You’ll Be Doing
As a member of our application team, you’ll be at the intersection of domain knowledge, a complex data model and a stream of real-world events. Every day, every portfolio is acted on simultaneously by market movements, user actions and system processes. Your job is to make sure the right things happen in the right order, and that edge cases are handled correctly so that financial advisors can trust what they’re seeing.
You’ll spend a lot of your time figuring out what correctness means when multiple actions hit a portfolio at once. You’ll need to distill this complexity into a clear experience that allows financial advisors to understand the impact of their choices and present the best possible information to their clients.
You’ll Be a Great Fit If You
Have a natural ability to think and reason about complex systems
Are able to dive into an unfamiliar domain and quickly build up working knowledge of how multiple components interact
Enjoy taking a cloud of complex problems and making them clear and straightforward
Are a proactive and effective learner who habitually analyzes and improves your own process
How We Work
We hire carefully because this domain is complex and correctness matters. The people who thrive here care deeply about understanding problems. They are comfortable talking things through with others, even when they know their understanding might be incomplete. They can make meaningful progress even before they fully understand the system. They strike a practical balance that keeps work moving: they can ship a fix, stabilize a production fire, or get an MVP out the door and keep thinking critically about the problem afterward, turning it over until they reach a root cause or a clearer understanding.
Primary Responsibilities
Explain issues, potential solutions and tradeoffs in ways that make sense to a variety of stakeholders
Write up bug reports and feature requests that expose the underlying user needs
Work with the development team to design a system that will help our users get things done and hold up under real world conditions
Write product documentation that helps users get up and running quickly
Organize the backlog in a way that facilitates prioritization
Work with development teams to assure smooth delivery and proactively expose risks
Track and analyze product outcomes
Requirements
1-3 years of experience building production applications OR a degree requiring strong quantitative skills (e.g. math, statistics, engineering, computer science)
Excellent interpersonal skills working with different kinds of stakeholders
Demonstrated ability to reason about quantitative data and systems with complex domain logic
Clear and concise written and verbal communication
Ability to think through multiple alternative solutions
Demonstrated ability to pick up new skills as needed.
Nice To Haves
Prior fintech experience is a plus but not necessary to thrive in this role.
Tools You’ll Use
Expected proficiency: you don’t need prior experience with the tools listed below. It is sufficient to be familiar enough with similar tools to pick any of them up within a few days.
JIRA to track work in progress
Confluence, Google Docs and Wiki.js to maintain documentation
Figma to design mockups
Miro to visualize workflows and conduct interactive meetings
Google sheets, Superset and some SQL to analyze usage data and produce charts and graphs
Open source coding agents + local LLMs
Location
We prefer candidates who are willing to work in a hybrid environment. Candidates in the Boston area should expect to work in-office 2 days/week for the first 6 months. Candidates outside the Boston area should expect to travel to Boston for 1 week at a time several times in the first six months and 3x per year thereafter.
Visa Sponsorship
Smartleaf is unable to provide visa sponsorship now or in the future. This includes, but is not limited to, H-1B, F-1 (including OPT/CPT), J-1, or any other employment-based immigration or work authorization sponsorship. Candidates must have current and ongoing authorization to work in the United States without sponsorship.
Salary Range
$100,000 - $120,000 /yr depending on relevant experience
Skills Required
- 1-3 years of experience building production applications or a degree requiring strong quantitative skills, such as mathematics, statistics, engineering, or computer science
- Excellent interpersonal skills working with different kinds of stakeholders
- Ability to reason about quantitative data and systems with complex domain logic
- Clear and concise written and verbal communication
- Ability to think through multiple alternative solutions
- Ability to pick up new skills as needed
- Prior fintech experience
What We Do
Smartleaf’s software and services make managing personalized, tax-optimized portfolios simple. So simple that wealth advisors can offer every client, of every size, the highest level of personalization and tax management; so simple that working with direct indexes is as easy as working with ETFs; so simple that advisors spend zero time rebalancing and trading portfolios. And so effective that wealth advisors who use our service can, for most of their clients, documentably save or defer more in taxes than they charge in fees. With Smartleaf, customization and tax-management options are simply choices on pull-down menus, and implementation is automated. Advisors spend zero time rebalancing and trading portfolios, freeing them to focus on clients. Our software as a service (SaaS) application and APIs are used by more than 1,200 advisors to manage over $50 billion across more than 200,000 accounts, everything from custom-tailored $100 million taxable accounts to $5 robo accounts with fractional shares.
