Staff Systems Engineer

At Inscribe, we're on a mission to catch fraud with confidence. In 2017, we set out to build the first document fraud detection product. Today, we process millions of applications each year and work with many of the leading fintechs and banks across the U.S. We believe the game of cat-and-mouse in fraud requires a fundamentally new approach. With care for our customers, attention to detail, and grounded execution, we’re reimagining how fraud is detected and prevented.

Inscribe is trusted by leading banks and fintechs, including Coinbase, Plaid, Bluevine, and Ramp. Inscribe is backed by Threshold Ventures, Uncork Capital, Y Combinator, Crosslink Capital, and Foundry, and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

Inscribe is scaling quickly, and our platform sits at the heart of our customers’ fraud workflows. We’re hiring a Staff Systems Engineer to take ownership of the systems and infrastructure that support our real-time API product and internal services.

This role blends DevOps, site reliability, cloud architecture, backend engineering, and datastore optimization. You'll work across the entire stack to drive performance, observability, scalability, and operational rigor. You'll be instrumental in ensuring that as our customer base and data volumes grow, our systems stay fast, stable, and cost-efficient.

We’re looking for a high-agency engineer who can evaluate what exists today, identify what won’t scale, and execute improvements aligned with our business goals. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks in systems, builds with urgency, and raises the engineering bar across the company.

• Lead design, implementation, and scaling of core infrastructure across compute (ECS), data (Postgres, Redis), observability (Datadog, Grafana), and networking layers

• Optimize deployment pipelines, test environments, and release automation to improve developer efficiency and reduce operational risk

• Monitor and improve production system uptime, latency, and cost performance

• Collaborate with engineers to tune service performance, database access patterns, and caching strategies

• Own capacity planning, system reliability, and on-call best practices — proactively preventing incidents, not just reacting to them

• Drive architectural decisions for high-throughput API services, balancing long-term scalability with short-term velocity

• Contribute to tooling and processes that foster operational excellence across the engineering organization

• Lead infrastructure projects from roadmap through rollout, always anchored in business impact and product goals

• Mentor teammates and model a high standard for engineering quality, documentation, and decision-making

We don't expect candidates to know everything, but experience in most of these areas will be helpful:

• Cloud: AWS (ECS, S3, Bedrock, etc.)

• Infrastructure: Terraform, Docker

• Observability: Datadog, Grafana

• Datastores: Postgres, Redis

• Languages: Python (Django), VueJS

• AI Platforms: Anthropic, AWS Bedrock

• 4+ years of hands-on experience across systems engineering, DevOps, SRE, or cloud architecture

• Proven ability to scale production systems and infrastructure in high-growth environments

• Deep familiarity with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and data-heavy backend systems

• Strong backend development skills in Python, with an ability to get deep into the codebase

• Passion for reducing toil, automating operational tasks, and improving engineering velocity

• Business-aware mindset: You can align infrastructure decisions with product goals and growth strategy

• Pragmatic, high-agency problem solver — able to balance short-term delivery with long-term vision

• You’re energized by wearing many hats, pushing technical boundaries, and leading by example
  

1. Initial Screen with the Hiring Manager to talk through the role and your experience (30 min)

2. Check In Call with HR to understand and align motivations and expectations (30 minutes)

3. Take Home Technical Exercise followed by a live discussion with 1-2 team members to review the test and assess your technical ability (1 hour)

4. Meet our CTO to discuss Inscribe’s vision and align on values (30 minutes)

At Inscribe, we are building a company and culture where everyone can produce their best work. Here are a few of our benefits and perks:

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity

• Comprehensive healthcare

• Unlimited vacation policy

• 401(k) and pension plans

• Complete work setup

• Monthly wellness stipend
  

Inscribe provides equity employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type with regards to  race, color, religion or religious belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, genetics,  gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws or prohibited by company policy.