Lithic is the modern card issuing and processing platform empowering ambitious financial companies to build the future of payments.
Our infrastructure powers card programs for 100+ innovative clients, from fintechs reimagining credit and digital banking to platforms transforming disbursements and spend management. Companies like Mercury, Flex, and Novo rely on Lithic's developer-friendly APIs, direct network connections, and flawless reconciliation to launch and scale card programs in weeks, not years.
We're building a future where access to better financial products materially improves people's lives, free from the constraints of 30-year-old mainframes and legacy processors. We're proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Stripes, and Mastercard, along with many others.
We're a team of 170+ across 26 states and 7 countries, headquartered in New York City.
Lithic is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for our Issuing team to work cross-functionally with product, solutions, compliance and support to build reliable, developer-friendly experiences that make the complicated world of payments safe and easy for our customers and their users.
Issuing is the front door for Lithic and its customers’ card payments programs. Nearly every API interaction and card transaction traces back to a card or account created by a service the Issuing team owns. We can be the reason a launch is successful, a customer signs on or an end user takes up a payment card in their day-to-day life.
You’ll build and own the services that manage the entire lifecycle of cards and account holders, including card issuance, physical card manufacturing, digital wallet and agentic tokenization, as well as the KYB/KYC programs that keep our customers and bank partners safe. Working with our team will turn you into an expert in the card payments space.
We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement listed below!
What You’ll Do:- Build and innovate in card and account lifecycle features
- Own initiatives from planning to launch, including working with stakeholders and demonstrating developer-first product design thinking
- Design APIs as products, thinking through the developer experience from endpoints to docs to error messages
- Build resilient, fault-tolerant systems with predictable failure modes and fast recovery
- Lead efforts to improve systems and processes both within the team and across teams
- Participate in the team’s on-call rotation
- Write and operate production services in Python and Rust on AWS
- 4+ years of experience shipping code in fast-paced production environments
- Strong distributed systems design skills, including building high-availability, fault-tolerant services
- Experience building APIs that drive the product experience for external developers
- Sound judgment about what has to be right the first time and what can ship with a narrower scope and be iterated on later
- The ability to advocate for high-leverage work and weigh it collaboratively against near-term deadlines
- Experience in or desire to learn Rust
- Growth mindset and continuous desire to learn and improve
- Previous experience in fintech (especially card payments) is a bonus
The annual US salary range for this role is $160,000 - $200,000 plus equity. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Lithic and will be narrowed during the interview process based on the candidate’s experience and qualifications.
This is a remote position. However, candidates must be located in the United States or Canada (Ontario or British Columbia). We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance.
Crack the code
A hidden code is tucked into this application. Find it and enter it below to continue.
- Unlimited PTO
- 12-weeks fully paid parental leave
- 4-Week Fully Paid Sabbatical (earned at your 5-year anniversary)
- Work From Anywhere: work from anywhere in the world 4-weeks each year
- 3% cashback on card purchases with your complimentary Privacy.com employee account
- Health, vision, and dental insurance; HSA Contribution Match
- 401(k) match
- Voluntary Life Insurance and STD/LTD
NYC-based employees work from our SoHo office three days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays are our core days, and you'll choose a third day that works for your schedule and team needs.
In-office employees receive:
- Commuter benefit
- Catered lunch every Tuesday and Thursday
Skills Required
- 4+ years of experience shipping code in fast-paced production environments
- Strong distributed systems design skills, including building highly available and fault-tolerant services
- Experience building APIs for external developers
- Sound judgment regarding scope, reliability, and iterative delivery
- Ability to advocate for high-leverage work and balance it against deadlines
- Experience in Rust or desire to learn Rust
- Growth mindset and continuous desire to learn and improve
- Previous fintech experience, especially card payments
- Must be located in the United States, Ontario, or British Columbia
Lithic Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Lithic and has not been reviewed or approved by Lithic.
-
Healthcare Strength — Health coverage includes medical, dental, and vision, with descriptions of comprehensive plans and even unlimited mental‑health therapy coverage. Company materials also note contributions toward premiums.
-
Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time‑away policies include flexible/unlimited PTO and a fully paid four‑week sabbatical after five years. Paid holidays and bereavement leave are also cited.
-
Parental & Family Support — Family support features 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for new parents. This policy is prominently listed alongside other core benefits.
Lithic Insights
What We Do
Before Lithic, we started Privacy.com in 2014 to build the safest and easiest way for consumers to pay online. We worked with a legacy issuer processor and it took us over a year to launch our card program. Even after we were up and running, scaling and ongoing maintenance were a pain—batch processing delays, scheduled downtime windows, and black-box systems we couldn't debug. From this experience, we learned firsthand that the financial services supply chain is broken—in the United States, the industry is still dominated by 30-year-old companies that run on mainframes. So we built Lithic, the issuing and processing infrastructure we always wanted, with developer-friendly, modern, well-documented APIs, insanely fast speed-to-market, and flawless reconciliation—purpose built to give card issuers extremely high levels of observability, control, and flexibility over their card programs. We own the entire technical stack: direct connections to Visa, Mastercard, and Amex, our own authorization engine delivering sub-100ms responses, an immutable ledger system, and real-time webhooks for every transaction event. Today, we power card programs for 100+ innovative companies including Mercury and Privacy.com—maintaining 99.99+% uptime without maintenance windows while processing billions in payment volume. And we're just getting started. Lithic currently has 150+ employees in 26 states and 6 countries, with an HQ in NYC, backed by Bessemer, Index, and Stripes.
Why Work With Us
Our team is at the center of everything we do. But we know that work isn't everything, we value flexibility and quality benefits. We strive to be a place where you know your ideas are always heard, you and your teammates learn from each other and make each other better, and you know your work is impacting users and the industry at large.
Gallery
