Senior Backend Engineer

What is Spade?

Spade is building the next generation of fintech infrastructure by providing real-time merchant intelligence for the card ecosystem. We leverage a proprietary, ground-truth database to link any card transaction to a real merchant identity – providing granular merchant, category, and geolocation information. Our API leads the market in terms of merchant coverage, data accuracy, and speed of transaction enrichment. 

We’re a fast growing, Series A company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). Our customers, including Stripe, Corpay, Mercury, and Unit, are industry leaders processing >$100B in card payments volume annually. They use our data to make better authorization decisions, detect and prevent fraud, build better banking infrastructure, and get a unique understanding of their users’ spending habits.

We’re a small and mighty hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of opinion, background, and experience. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

We're looking for experienced backend engineers who are energized by solving problems for our customers and for our team. As an early member of our engineering team you'll be able to make a meaningful impact, have a great deal of ownership, and will be presented with opportunities to work in a wide variety of areas. You will:

• Develop and maintain high-performance, scalable REST APIs, collaborating with product and data science teams to bring technical and product visions to life
• Design, build, and improve on batch processing data pipelines using DataBricks Delta, ensuring data integrity and reliability throughout the pipelines
• Get into the weeds of our data infrastructure, efficiently moving and transforming data between systems and technologies to support analytics and customer needs
• Own the implementation and maintenance of best engineering practices, such as testing, abstractions, and design documentation standards
• Foster a learning-oriented culture by contributing to code quality, participating in code reviews and mentoring peers
• Communicate effectively with product owners, analysts, and customer success to ensure alignment on feature development, releases, and support needs

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary? 

• This position is remote friendly (with an option to come to an office if in the NYC area), but only open to applicants based in the United States and Canada. 
• Must-have: 
  • 5+ years of experience building and scaling backend Python-based systems
  • Proven expertise in at least two of the following areas: infrastructure, data pipelines, and API development
  • Experience in early-stage startup environments building systems from scratch, making trade-offs, and executing autonomously and quickly
  • Strong product mindset and a focus on delivering customer value
  • A collaborative working style, fostering a culture of mentorship, shared success, and continuous improvement
  • Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to navigate ambiguity using metrics, data insights, and customer feedback
• Nice-to-have: 
  • Proficiency in Django and SQL
  • Familiarity with data science and analytics tools such as Pyspark, Databricks and Delta Lake, and Looker
  • Experience with cloud infrastructure and tools like AWS CDK
  • Experience with transaction, merchant, and/or location data
  • Experience and/or interest in fintech and/or data products

Why join Spade? 

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. 
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team that just raised a Series A – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside. 
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. Our products will power the next wave of innovation in fintech, helping our customers deliver better, more transparent products and services to the consumer. 

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401K for retirement planning
• Remote-friendly team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
• Paid parental leave
• Work from home stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

As part of our commitment to health and safety, Spade requires employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as permitted under applicable law.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team. 
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity. 
• The anticipated cash salary range for this role for candidates based in the United States is between $170,000 and $190,000 USD, with an equity grant.
• The anticipated cash salary range for this role for candidates based in Canada is between $195,000 and $215,000 CAD, with an equity grant.