Collections runs like an emergency room. You show up in crisis, get triaged by a stranger who doesn't know your history and leave with no follow-up. We're turning it into primary care for consumer finance. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere.
70 million Americans fall behind on a debt every year. Most want to pay what they owe and can't find a way back. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. They rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more with us because we collect more and charge less.
Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to do the opposite. In someone's hardest financial moment we make the experience more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The one in collections today is the one who gets approved tomorrow.
As a Senior SRE you will ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of January's production and internal systems as we scale from thousands to millions of borrowers. You'll establish SRE practices from the ground up - architecting resilient infrastructure, implementing proactive monitoring solutions, and building sustainable on-call processes that evolve with our rapid growth. Your work will directly tackle our current scaling challenges including database optimization, async workflow infrastructure, and data pipeline reliability while ensuring our engineering team can ship with confidence.
Lead incident response and establish sustainable on-call practices, including comprehensive runbooks, blameless postmortems, and systematic improvements that reduce MTTR
Develop and maintain self-service observability solutions using modern monitoring tools that provide actionable insights for troubleshooting and performance optimization
Create and maintain infrastructure as code (using Terraform, CloudFormation) that allows for consistent, scalable, and secure cloud environments on AWS
Partner closely with feature teams to architect resilient infrastructure for critical components (databases, networking, async workflows, data pipelines) that scale seamlessly
Work closely with DevX to design and implement robust CI/CD pipelines with advanced deployment strategies (blue/green, canary) that enable teams to ship confidently and rapidly
Advocate for best practices early in feature design, ensuring we design with reliability in mind and future-proof our services
Expertise leading incident response for high-availability production systems, thorough root cause analysis, and fostering blameless postmortem culture
Experience designing highly available deployment architectures across multiple targets (e.g. EC2, Fargate), with expertise in auto-scaling, health checks, and graceful degradation strategies
Track record of implementing effective monitoring & observability solutions (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, ELK), and evangelizing best practices
Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services and infrastructure-as-code practices using tools like Terraform
Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation to enable reliable, efficient deployments
Excellent communication skills with experience documenting processes and collaborating across engineering teams
We encourage you to apply even if your experience isn’t an exact match. We value professional development and on-the-job learning!
We are currently hiring for this position in our New York office.
As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.
Skills Required
- Expertise leading incident response for high-availability production systems
- Experience designing highly available deployment architectures
- Track record of implementing effective monitoring solutions
- Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation
- Excellent communication skills
January Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Company materials highlight medical, dental, and vision coverage with subsidization for employees and their families. Public descriptions present the package as comprehensive for its market.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO is emphasized, and third-party listings note an unlimited policy with a minimum floor to encourage rest. This breadth of time away complements standard paid holidays and sick time described in external profiles.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental leave is repeatedly called generous, with public profiles describing fully paid leave for new parents, including adoption and fostering. Family medical leave and related supports are also referenced.
January Insights
What We Do
At January, we bring humanity to consumer finance. Using data intelligence, we create trust and deliver better outcomes for consumers and creditors alike. Our mission is simple: expand access to credit while empowering consumers to achieve lasting stability and control of their financial lives. We began by building the foundation for creditors to engage with and support their borrowers at scale across the entire debt lifecycle. We’ve mastered outsourced collections by combining best-in-class performance with differentiated consumer satisfaction and superior compliance. And we’re just getting started. Together, we’re creating a financial system where trust and opportunity spark lasting change in people’s lives.
Why Work With Us
We're driven to push boundaries and thrive in a culture of collaboration, rapid growth, and continuous learning, January offers the chance to do your best work. We thrive on: Write to clarify thinking, scale collaboration, and drive intentionality. Prioritize impact over routine. Embrace growth, feedback. Assume and act with positive intent.
Gallery
January Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
Headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco, we believe that in-person collaboration promotes creativity, camaraderie, and trust amongst our team. Because of this, we operate on a hybrid model, where our team comes in 3x a week.











