Software Engineer, Home Lending

As a software engineer on the Home Lending team, you’ll help build and grow Upstart’s 2 newest products: HELOC and Mortgage. 

The Team:

We’re a small team building our own business. Our first product, launched in summer ‘23, is a home equity line of credit (HELOC) for homeowners. Our next product is a home loan (mortgage) for homebuyers. Both of these are Upstart’s most complex products to date, and we need more talented, creative thinkers to be successful!

Why Mortgage? This industry is the largest category of consumer credit in the US, with over $2 trillion in originations last year. This is where Upstart can make its biggest impact.

Why us? The market has left behind millions of Americans with imperfect credit or difficult-to-document income. Serving these customers is Upstart’s bread and butter, and it’s core to our mission. Because we use machine learning to assess creditworthiness versus a fixed formula more than a decade old (FICO), we’re able to extend loans to prospective homeowners that our competitors just can’t. We’ve proven this model with personal loans and auto loans, and now we want to bring this access to where families feel it the most: where they live.

We want our team to reflect the people we’re serving. To serve customers at the fringes, we need people who think at the fringes—weird, quirky, out-of-the-box do-ers who reason from first principles and not from the status quo. We leave our ego at the door and crave being proven wrong. We're a high-empathy team, and we succeed as a team first, individuals second.

Role description: 

As an engineer on one of Upstart’s newest teams, you’ll work closely with cross-functional partners, working across the whole stack. You're a self-starter that's able to leverage tools in your toolbelt to pave your own path forward to progress and deliver work with quality, testability, resiliency, and maintainability in mind. You may currently specialize on the frontend (React) or backend (Kotlin), but you're looking to get your hands into both areas of the stack. You're eager to learn and grow as an individual but also enjoy helping your team come along for the ride.

Travel Requirements - This team has regular onsite collaboration sessions. These occur roughly once per quarter (~3 days at a time) in one of our main offices (Columbus, OH or San Mateo, CA). If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.

How you’ll make an impact:

Beyond leveraging our existing tech (AWS, Kafka, Spring Boot, Next.js, Kubernetes, Kotlin, React), here’s how you’ll make an impact:

• Proactively search out ways to make an impact beyond the Jira board
• Turn feature-specific tasks into opportunities to up-level the team’s codebase and product
• Know the product intimately enough to propose changes to requirements when we need to find a middle path
• Propose and deliver new ideas that achieve meaningful improvements to our team’s metrics
• Contribute in a meaningful way to quality improvements within our team

What we’re looking for: 

• Minimum requirements:
  • 1+ years professional experience in fullstack software
  • 1+ years proficiency in Kotlin, Java, or C#. (Our backend is in Kotlin, but Java and C# are similar enough that you can learn on the job.)
  • Some hands-on experience with a JavaScript framework like React
  • Some hands-on experience with SQL databases and domain modeling
• Preferred qualifications:
  • Excellent written and verbal communication. As an engineer, a big part of your job will be representing your projects in cross-functional conversations, and you’ll need to tailor your communication style to fit these different audiences’ needs.
  • Preference for face-time and synchronous collaboration. We’re a distributed team of remote workers (from coast to coast), and while we predominantly build asynchronously, we prefer facetime when collaborating in a tight feedback loop. You’ll need to be comfortable with a few hours of Zoom per day (e.g. mob programming) to excel in this role.
  • Comfortable challenging authority. We want engineers who can push back on their managers when they think we’re going down the wrong path. Related: you thrive in environments where you are expected to think like an owner and make decisions like one.

What you'll love: 

• Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart 
• 401(k) with 100% company match up to $4,500 and immediate vesting and after-tax savings
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Life and disability insurance
• Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave  
• Supportive parental, family care, and military leave programs
• Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
• Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
• Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices

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