Lead Software Engineer (Backend)

Current Employees of Happen Bank: Please apply via your internal Workday Account

Happen Bank (formerly LendingClub) is built around a simple purpose: to clear the way to help people turn intention into action, and action into financial progress. That means offering focused products, a frictionless mobile-first experience, and clear terms with no gotchas. Respect and fairness is part of our DNA, and that ideal shapes how we work, how we treat each other, and how we invest in our employees and our community. Join us in using data, bold thinking, and a commitment to innovation to help clear the way for millions of Americans to achieve more.

About the Role

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll independently drive complex initiatives across the investor marketplace and consumer platforms, owning distributed systems end to end and leading software design, development, and delivery. This role focuses on taking ambiguous, complex problems and transforming them into reliable, well-architected systems that investors, partners, and consumers depend on every day.

What You'll Do

• Lead initiatives end to end across investor marketplace and partner integration teams, from technical analysis and system design through delivery and operation
• Own the design and reliability of core marketplace systems, including the trading platform, funding platform, trade settlement, investor onboarding, and order book management
• Design and operate distributed systems on cloud infrastructure, addressing the challenges of consistency, fault tolerance, and scale that come with high-throughput workloads
• Make and document technical decisions, weighing tradeoffs in scalability, cost, and maintainability for systems built on Java and cloud technologies
• Lead system design discussions and design reviews, partnering with software architects, product managers, and business stakeholders to align technical direction with business goals
• Drive external vendor and partner integrations at scale, ensuring data integrity and resilience as order flow moves through investor-facing applications into settlement
• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across services, using strong debugging skills to trace problems through distributed systems and cloud infrastructure
• Integrate AI tools into day-to-day engineering — accelerating analysis, coding, and review — and show peers practical, responsible ways to apply them
• Improve how the team works by strengthening engineering practices, workflows, and standards for quality, testing, and observability, and by mentoring engineers through code review and pairing

About You

• 8+ years of software engineering experience; bachelor's degree or higher, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• You have a deep understanding of RESTful API design and build clean, well-versioned, and resilient APIs for internal and external consumers
• You're an SME in Java and its ecosystem, including Spring Boot, JPA / Hibernate, JVM - OpenJDK, Oracle JDK, or Amazon Corretto
• You have strong system design skills and are experienced designing distributed systems that stay reliable under scale, failure, and change
• You're experienced building and operating cloud-native services on AWS and designing data models on relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle
• You're a strong debugger who can trace issues across service boundaries, infrastructure, and third-party dependencies to root cause
• You have hands-on experience integrating with external vendors and partner systems, and you design for resilience when dependencies are outside your control
• You take ownership of your domain — driving outcomes independently, anticipating risk, and following through
• You have hands-on experience using AI tools to accelerate your work and improve output quality, you're equally using them yourself and showing colleagues how, and you're thoughtful about their limitations and where human judgment matters most
• You set a high bar for security, maintainability, and the long-term cost of decisions made in the name of speed
• You collaborate effectively across engineering, product, and business, and you adapt your approach based on feedback and context

Nice to Have

• Experience in banking, trading platforms, or other regulated financial industries

• Experience with working front end technologies

• Experience with event-driven architectures and high-throughput, low-latency systems

• Track record of building partner or third-party integrations at scale

Work Location 

San Francisco

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