Software Engineer

This is a role for people who like making complex things simply work; who enjoy carefully thinking through hard problems and solving them both in theory and in practice; who want to have ownership of a meaningful part of a product. We care more about how you think than about how many years of experience you have. You might be early in your career, or you might have been doing this for a long time. What matters is that you can reason clearly, learn quickly, and take responsibility for your work.

We’re a venture-funded startup growing quickly. That means you’ll have a lot of opportunity to learn and a lot of influence over how the system is built. It also means the work is not always neatly divided into tickets. You’ll need to investigate problems, make tradeoffs, communicate directly, and follow things through.

We use AI extensively to supercharge our software development, but we do not abdicate our engineering judgment to the LLM. You are expected to understand the code you ship, verify that it works, and be able to explain why it is correct, both in theory and in practice.

Our main stack is TypeScript, React, NestJS, and Vite. Some parts of the system use C++ on Windows. Prior experience with these technologies is useful but not required. The right engineer can learn a new language or framework when the work requires it.

Our engineering team is organized into units. The boundaries are useful, but they are not permanent. All of these units are important. There is no “supporting” unit and no unit that exists only to clean up after the others. We expect engineers to understand the wider system and to be able to transition between units when that is the best use of their abilities.

• UX owns the customer-facing experience. This work is primarily React and frontend development, in close collaboration with design. UX engineers are also empowered to submit pull requests for backend changes when that is the right way to complete a feature.

• Core owns the internal data types, algorithms, and APIs. This includes the database schema and repositories, the REST backend, and desktop application. Core engineers review and merge backend pull requests from the UX unit.

• Integrations owns the part of our product that handles connections with third-party systems such as gateways, processors, systems of record, etc. This is where most of our secret sauce is.

• QA owns the tools and systems we use to ensure the correctness and robustness of our product. These are not qualities that can be added onto the product after it’s built, so QA tooling is an integral part of product development and the QA unit is a first class citizens in our organization.

• Developer Platform maintains developer tooling, cloud infrastructure-as-code, cloud tooling, and the CI/CD pipeline. This is a front-line unit, responsible for delivering the product into the hands of the users.
  

We expect you to have a strong understanding of computer science and software engineering, in particular:

• the type theory underpinning Typescript and how to leverage in a real-world project to achieve a high degree of intrinsic code quality;

• the principles of relational database design;

• enough knowledge of complexity theory to be able to reason quantitatively about compute, memory, network, and storage resources;

• an understanding of the intricacies of concurrent programming and how they affect our product.
  

You should be able to:

• Work autonomously and make progress with limited supervision.

• Architect solutions thoughtfully with the objectives of maintainability and robustness.

• Produce reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimates of resource requirements given the specs of a product.

• Work experimentally and quantitatively to diagnose problems and explore solutions.

• Produce code that you understand and that other engineers can use and maintain.

• Learn tools, languages, and systems you have not used before.

• Work across boundaries if a feature or fix requires it.

• Review code critically and accept criticism of your own work.

• Test your work at the right level, including the unhappy paths.

• Communicate clearly about uncertainty, risk, and tradeoffs.

• Take your product to the finish line, ensuring that it fulfills the needs of the users.

We care about strong fundamentals, curiosity, and sound judgment more than your résumé.

You’ll have a leading role in developing a part of a real fintech system, with the chance to:

• Work on products that have a direct impact on our users and our bottom line.

• Solve problems that you have never seen before.

• Learn quickly by taking on meaningful challenges across different parts of the system.

• Use modern development tools, including AI-assisted workflows, in a thoughtful and responsible way.

• Influence technical decisions in an impactful way.

• Work closely with engineers, design, and the people using the product.

If you want to build a meaningful product and grow fast, you’ll enjoy being part of our team.

Anchorbase is a venture-backed fintech and automation company building a modern merchant operations and payments platform for businesses across North America.
We combine payment processing, intelligent workflow automation, and AI-enabled operational tooling to help merchants simplify payments, improve reconciliation, reduce operational friction, and modernize how they interact with their financial systems.