Software Engineer, Home Lending

About Upstart

Upstart is a leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than two-thirds of Upstart loans are approved instantly and are fully automated.

Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

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

Why home loans? Millions of homeowners are locked into long-term low-interest mortgages and looking for a way to access their equity. By securing a loan against their house, we can lend them fast, affordable credit for remodels, big purchases, or paying off debt. This is a huge category of consumer credit, and it’s where we can make our biggest impact.

Why us? The market has left behind millions of Americans with imperfect credit or difficult-to-document income. Serving these customers is our bread and butter, and it’s core to our mission. Because we use machine learning and automation to assess credit-worthiness, we can offer a faster experience at a better price.

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.

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.

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:
  • 4+ years professional experience in fullstack software
  • 4+ 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 skills. 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.

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. But our team still has regular onsite collaboration sessions. These o