Senior Staff Software Engineer

Oportun
Summary
Join Oportun, a mission-driven fintech company, as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. You will play a key role in designing, building, and maintaining foundational services for our high-availability, fault-tolerant applications. This position requires significant experience in building foundational services and infrastructure, with a strong focus on continuous delivery and zero-downtime deployments. You will help define and implement software development approaches, build platform architecture, and re-architect foundational services to improve efficiency and robustness. The ideal candidate will have expertise in distributed systems, various programming languages, and container-based applications. You will lead and mentor teams, drive operational excellence, and collaborate across the organization to achieve Oportun's high-speed value delivery strategy.
Requirements
- Typically requires a minimum 15 years of related experience with a bachelor's degree; or a master's degree with an equivalent combination of education and experience
- Proven experience (13+ years) in software development with a strong focus on platform services
- Exemplary distributed system design skills
- Proven ability to take on huge re-architectures and delivering successfully
- Expertise in one or more programming languages such as Java, Python, C++, or similar
- Mastery of software design principles, data structures, and algorithms
- Expertise in infrastructure stability, and scalability
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex technical and business problems
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams
- Proven ability to lead and mentor multiple teams across multiple complex business problems
- Financial services or fintech industry experience is a strong advantage
- Strong experience (3+ years) in Continuous Delivery and zero-downtime deployment capabilities
- Knowledge of and a keen eye towards secure development practices and platform security
- Expertise (5+ years) in designing, building, deploying, and maintaining container-based applications
- Expertise (5+ years) in designing and building force multiplicative platform services that scale well
- Must have some experience (2+ years) in Kubernetes, should have experience in tools like StrongDM, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub
Responsibilities
- You will help define, refine, standardize, implement, and evangelize approaches to software development in a Continuous Delivery zero-downtime environment that raises the bar across the enterprise
- You will build platform architecture for the enterprise to make our engineers more productive and our solutions more robust
- You will rearchitect foundational services that will help become force multipliers for the company
- You will be called upon to mediate discussions and build alignment on technical approach across teams
- Your delivery of architecture sets the standard for the enterprise with a high focus on force multiplication, engineering excellence, innovation, continuous delivery, and a shift-left mentality
- You lead incorporation of appropriate continuous feedback loops measuring customer value, usage patterns, and other actionable metrics of value
- You drive operational excellence across the org and propose scalable ways to continually improve OE
- You break through surface-level remediation for on-call issues and identify high-impact initiatives to reduce on-call escalation across the organization
- You provide technical and organizational guidance while continuing to be deeply engaged in technical delivery of platform services and infrastructure
- You enable collaboration between teams in the technology organization through the platform services and infrastructure you design and implement
- You can recognize opportunities where Oportun is under or overinvested in platform capabilities and can build a strong case on why Oportun needs to focus on these areas
- Alongside your peers you will design and drive the platform services and infrastructure strategy across the CTO organization
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience or Knowledge in financial services
- Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment