Staff Software Engineer, Nova

Why Join AngelList 
We’re solving some of the hardest problems in venture capital and private markets. You’ll work with a team that values precision, urgency, and long-term thinking. If you want to shape how startups are funded and built, this is the place.
About AngelList
We exist to accelerate innovation by increasing the number of successful startups in the world. We do this by building the financial infrastructure that makes it easier for more people to invest in world-changing companies.
AngelList is the nexus of venture capital and the startup community. We support $171B+ in assets and have powered investments into over 13,000 startups—over 300 of which are unicorns. Today, 57% of top-tier U.S. VC deals involve investors on AngelList. While our scale is large, our ambition is larger.
If you're excited to build the future of private markets, come build with us.
About the Role:
Nova is our next-generation platform for fund operations, enabling venture firms to focus on investing rather than administration. Nova’s workflows manage the movement of money between VC firms and their LPs. The domain is complex, the stakes are real (we move actual dollars), and correctness is non-negotiable.
As a Staff Software Engineer on Nova, you will be the person who defines and designs how this team builds. You'll own the domain model and architectural patterns that every engineer on the team reaches for.
If you're a catalyst who makes a team of eight build like a team of twenty — by setting clear patterns, engineering context into the codebase, and driving critical initiatives forward — this role is for you.

Responsibilities:

• Own Nova's domain model and architectural direction. Identify core financial workflows, extract them into well-bounded domain components, and rebuild them using standard architecture patterns that scale to all customers.
• Raise the team's ceiling through code review, system design pairing, and ADRs that make architectural decisions legible and teachable. Coach senior engineers toward staff-level thinking. Help them build broader scope, sharper tradeoff instincts and stronger ownership.
• Drive technical direction across Nova's service boundaries - shaping integration contracts with Banking/Treasury, KYC, and Fund Administration so that cross-team work is coherent, not ad hoc.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to surface technical risk early, shape roadmaps around domain realities, and ensure we're building on solid foundations before we build fast.
• Make high-judgment technical calls in ambiguous situations especially where correctness, auditability, and financial risk intersect. You act decisively without waiting for perfect information or full consensus.
• Contribute hands-on code to the codebase alongside your leadership responsibilities. We value engineers who stay in the trenches and lead by example.

What we’re looking for:

• You've operated at staff level or equivalent - high autonomy, impact beyond your immediate team, and a track record of architectural decisions that held up as systems scaled.
• Strong domain modeling instincts. You think in terms of aggregates, invariants, and boundaries. You naturally decompose systems into units that each have one clear purpose, communicate through well-defined interfaces, and can be understood independently.
• A demonstrated multiplier effect on engineering teams. You've been the person who defined the patterns a team reached for and the team was measurably better for it. You care as much about how the team builds as what it ships.
• You earn architectural authority through judgment and follow-through, not title. Engineers adopt your patterns because the patterns are obviously right.
• Comfort in high-stakes, domain-rich systems. You may not know fund administration today, but you've built systems where correctness matters e.g. financial, healthcare, infrastructure, or similar. You have a track record of building deep domain expertise quickly.
• Hands-on coding ability. You write production code regularly, review others' work rigorously, and have no interest in becoming a purely advisory engineer.

Working Here
If you don’t meet every requirement above, we still encourage you to apply. We value complementary strengths and operators who learn by doing.
AngelList has offices in a few cities, with our engineering hub in San Francisco. We’re building our engineering and product teams around this hub to make the most of in-person collaboration. We have a hybrid in-office model: teammates come in at least 2 days per week (Tuesdays and either Wednesday or Thursday).
Compensation: The compensation for this role consists of a competitive base salary, benefits, and equity package. The base sal