Staff Engineer

About Clair

If you can send your friends money in seconds, why does it still take your employer two weeks to send your paycheck?

At Clair, we are on a mission to create financial freedom for America's workers by giving them a digital banking platform that allows them to get paid as soon as they clock out of work. But we're not just another digital bank or on-demand pay provider. We meet Americans at their place of work by embedding our products within the scheduling, workforce management, and payroll apps they already use every day. 

Learn more about us at getclair.com/about

About the Role

We are seeking a world-class Staff Engineer (Fullstack) who thrives on solving high-impact, complex problems. You will own critical system architecture, shape the future of real-time financial transactions, and build at a massive scale. Your work will directly enable millions of hourly workers to access financial freedom.

We operate at the intersection of fintech, embedded finance, and real-time payroll systems—building products that handle millions of transactions with sub-second performance.

If you are a problem solver who loves technical challenges, is passionate about performance optimization, security, and scalable architecture, and wants to influence key product decisions, you’ll love working with us.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own and architect mission-critical financial applications, ensuring real-time, high-availability performance at scale.
• Design highly scalable APIs that support millions of transactions, leveraging cutting-edge cloud infrastructure.
• Lead high-performance engineering projects from conception to deployment, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and security.
• Optimize transaction processing systems to ensure instant payments and sub-millisecond response times.
• Make key architectural decisions to scale our on-demand pay and embedded finance solutions.
• Set the engineering bar high by leading performance optimizations, security improvements, and system reliability enhancements.
• Work alongside top engineers in a fast-paced, high-impact environment where decisions directly impact millions of users.

Required Experience & Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience building, launching, and maintaining scalable fintech products.
• Demonstrated mastery in backend development is required. While proficiency with PHP/Laravel is preferred, candidates with experience in other backend languages and a proven ability to rapidly adapt to new technologies will be considered.
• Proficiency in frontend development using React.js, TypeScript, JavaScript (ES6+), and Expo (React Native).
• Appreciation for beautiful, clear code and great developer experience
• Ability to prototype, develop, and ship entire application features
• Take responsibility for the reliability of your code by incorporating robust, automated testing practices.
• Product oriented with a razor sharp attention to detail
• Thrive in an all-remote working environment with the ability to clearly communicate complex technical topics via Slack and other asynchronous tools
• Experience with databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.
• Adaptability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment and navigate uncertainty.
• Excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills with an ability to influence decisions.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience working with financial technology platforms and payroll systems.
• Specific experience in lending, payments, BNPL, ACH, etc is highly valued.
• Ability to periodically travel for team headquarters meetings and company on-sites.

Why Join Us?

• Massive impact: Your work will empower millions of workers to access their wages instantly.
• Challenging, meaningful work: We are solving hard fintech problems at scale.
• Autonomy & ownership: Engineers own features end-to-end and influence architecture and product decisions.
• Top-tier teammates: Work with elite engineers who are passionate about high-performance, scalable systems.
• Fast-moving culture: We prioritize execution, technical excellence, and customer impact.
• Growth opportunities: Lead projects, mentor others, and grow into a Principal or Staff Engineer.
• Flexible work & perks: Competitive salary, equity, unlimited PTO, conference stipends, and top-tier benefits.

Additional Details

Location Options:

• Fully remote.

Compensation: The annual base salary for this role is $110,000-$120,000. The base pay for this role is determined using many factors, such as education, skills and experience and is reflective of Clair Series stage and size.  Base pay is only one part of Clair’s competitive total compensation package which includes equity, benefits and additional perks. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.