Staff Software Engineer, Checkr Pay

About Checkr
Checkr builds people infrastructure for the future of work. And we believe everyone should have a fair chance to work. That's why we've designed a faster—and fairer—way to screen job seekers. Established in 2014 and valued at $5B, Checkr puts modern technology powered by machine learning in the hands of hiring teams, helping thousands of companies like Uber, Instacart, Netflix, Compass Group, and Adecco to hire great new people with an experience that’s fast, smooth, and safe.

A career at Checkr means collaborating with brilliant minds, disrupting an industry, and opening channels of employment to often overlooked candidates. Checkr has been recognized as one of BuiltIn's 2023 Best Places to Work in the US and is a Y Combinator 2023 Breakthrough Company and Top Company by Valuation.

Checkr is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join Checkr X, our innovation program aimed at finding and bringing to market new product bets for Checkr. This team is specifically thinking about People infrastructure for the future of work, beyond background checks. It’s also designed to operate and iterate quickly like a new startup, while being able to leverage our existing strengths and assets from our core business. Think about joining a startup within a startup!

We are specifically hiring a staff engineer for Checkr Pay - our bet in the payments space. Checkr Pay is a full-service payments platform for the gig economy. Checkr Pay allows gig platforms to pay their workforce instantly, seconds after completing a job, at no cost to the earner. Our core product is a digital wallet experience, including a free Visa debit card, that is embedded directly in gig platform apps/websites or accessed as a stand-alone web experience. This product supports a seamless onboarding flow for new earners, significantly improving conversion. Our embedded instant pay solution is the core platform on which we are building a new financial ecosystem for the gig economy, which moves the needle on financial inclusion for the unbanked and underbanked. This ecosystem includes rewards, benefits, fraud prevention, new financial products, and more. Learn more about our vision here.

We launched our MVP in late 2022, and have seen incredible early traction. Join our team as we rapidly scale our product to power the future of the gig economy!

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with our leadership team and early adopters to design and implement new products
• Bring a customer-centric, product-first mindset to the table - collaborate with customers to resolve product ambiguities and ship impactful features
• Develop new end to end web and mobile applications
• Build new industry-leading APIs
• Instrument and deploy new product experiments
• Leverage the Checkr ecosystem (systems, data) when appropriate to accelerate development of those new concepts

What you bring:

• Have founded or held early roles at fast-paced startups
• 7+ years of full stack software development experience
• Advanced knowledge in NodeJs / Javascript and React (or similar languages/frameworks)
• Some good product sense - not every UI flow will have a mockup ready for you :)
• Experimentation mindset - autonomy and empowerment to validate a customer need, get team buy-in, and ship a rapid MVP
• A strong sense of ownership from feature design through production release
• Understanding of staged rollouts and what’s needed for MVPs - imperfect today is better than perfect next week!
• Ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders (customers, internal partners) to understand a high-level problem and architect a solution
• Willingness to dedicate a fair amount of time supporting customers
• Experience building scalable technical architecture that can scale to 1mm+ users (including observability tooling, container orchestration, etc)
• Experience with building security-first products from the ground up (e.g., best practices for authentication and rate limiting, considering how an adversary might abuse attack surface)
• Willingness to mentor junior engineers to grow their skillset and guide ownership of high-impact features

Nice to have:

• Experience integrating with third-party applications
• Experience creating, maintaining, and operating microservices
• Experience in securing and optimizing the applications you help create
• Experience developing platforms built using an asynchronous event-based architecture
• Experience with a variety of payment rails, including ACH, instant push-to-debit
• Mobile development experience with cross-platform frameworks

We are committed to leveling the playing field and welcome all interested candidates to apply, even if you don’t meet every qualification outlined above.

What you get:

• A fast-paced and collaborative environment
• Learning and development allowance
• Competitive compensation and opportunity for advancement
• 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Up to 25K reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and parental planning services
• Flexible PTO policy
• Monthly wellness stipend, home office stipend

At Checkr, we believe a hybrid work environment strengthens collaboration, drives innovation, and encourages connection. Our hub locations are Denver, CO, San Francisco, CA, and Santiago, Chile. Individuals are expected to work from the office 2 to 3 days a week. In-office perks are provided, such as lunch four times a week, a commuter stipend, and an abundance of snacks and beverages.

One of Checkr’s core values is Transparency. To live by that value, we’ve made the decision to disclose salary ranges in all of our job postings. We use geographic cost of labor as an input to develop ranges for our roles and as such, each location where we hire may have a different range. If this role is remote, we have listed the top to the bottom of the possible range, but we will specify the target range for an exact location when you are selected for a recruiting discussion. For more information on our compensation philosophy, see our website.

The base salary range for this role is $204,138 to $276,186 in San Francisco, CA.

Equal Employment Opportunities at Checkr

Checkr is committed to hiring talented and qualified individuals with diverse backgrounds for all of its tech, non-tech, and leadership roles. Checkr believes that the gathering and celebration of unique backgrounds, qualities, and cultures enriches the workplace.

Checkr also welcomes the opportunity to consider qualified applicants with prior arrest or conviction records. Checkr’s commitment to diversity extends to hiring talented individuals in spite of a prior criminal history in accordance with local, state, and/or federal laws, including the San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance.