Product Engineer, Backend

**This role is hybrid with 3 days a week in our NYC office.

Pinwheel - Building the future of financial services in partnership with the biggest brands

“I love my banking app!” said no one, ever.

Pinwheel is on a mission to change that. We believe banks and financial service providers represent the greatest opportunity to build 10x better experiences, especially in the AI age. We’re building the next generation of financial products alongside some of the biggest names in the market including Robinhood, DoorDash, Credit Karma, Amex, Discover, Intuit, Acorns, Visa and more. 

If you’re excited by the idea of having your work touch and impact the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers, Pinwheel is the place for you. 

If you get stoked about building products alongside the biggest brands in the world, Pinwheel is the place for you. 

If you want to join a scrappy, hustling team that is obsessed with defining the future of financial services, Pinwheel is the place for you! 

Pinwheel has raised $77M from top-tier investors such as Coatue, Notable, First Round, Upfront, Primary, American Express, Franklin Templeton, Indeed, Semper Virens and more.

We’re hiring a world-class Engineer

Pinwheel is looking for a creative product-focused engineer that craves autonomy and impact in their role to work across Pinwheel’s entire customer-facing stack. Product Engineering is at the heart of what we do here, and this role will help select and lead impactful projects that touch the surfaces our customers use every day. You’ll work on a nimble team, working directly with cross-functional stakeholders across Engineering, Product, and Design, to execute this mission-critical work.

You’ll focus mostly on back-end engineering work (web-based microservices, customer-facing APIs), with some supporting front-end engineering work as well.

Finally, you’ll join a team known for high-velocity, high-quality output and contribute to leveling up that team through mentorship and continuous improvement of our processes and standards.

What will you do?

• Deeply understand our customer needs and design systems to solve them


• Build, scale, and evolve the data models, services, and systems that power our APIs


• Design and ship impactful new functionality in our products, especially focused on our internal and customer-facing back-end APIs


• Maintain and improve our Python-based microservice stack


• Support (and at times lead) the development of new products in the Pinwheel ecosystem, balancing high product velocity with quality and reliability


• Contribute to iterative technical quality: we pay down tech debt while we’re working on new projects and expect you to be a leader in the responsible pay-down of tech debt


• Create and improve tooling, processes, and engineering standards across the team


• Mentor engineers and help the team grow

What qualifications are necessary?

• 5+ years of experience building and maintaining back-end or full-stack applications: data modeling, application logic, and API design


• Prior experience working at an early-stage startup or small tech company


• Deep expertise with modern back-end languages/frameworks (e.g. FastAPI, Django, Rails, Gin)


• At least some experience working with modern frontend web frameworks (React, Vue, etc.)


• Prior experience working on API-based products is a big plus


• Played key implementation roles in projects with multiple teams and engineers


• Desire to learn new systems and technology as our business evolves


• Ability to design systems and evaluate the tradeoffs in scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability


• Passion for working closely with customers


• Creativity, empathy, and a drive for continuous improvement

Why join Pinwheel?

Best time to join - Our company is small but well-funded, meaning you are joining at a time where you can impact and shape the company.

Be a cultural builder - You will have an active hand in molding the company culture and being a part of the entrepreneurial journey.

Build something revolutionary - Help build the products on the bleeding edge of financial services!

Belong - Join a community that is passionate and relentless about building fairer financial systems for all.

Benefits included:

• Great compensation & equity packages


• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits


• Life & short-term disability insurance


• Unlimited vacation


• Paid parental leave


• 401K for retirement planning


• Mentorship opportunities


• Free Citibike membership


• Pet friendly offices and Zoom spaces

At Pinwheel, total compensation is made up of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they can bring to the organization in delivering outsized results. The talent market is competitive, and maintaining our ability to recruit and retain the best team possible is a top priority for Pinwheel. When creating an offer, we consider interview performance, candidate experience, external market competitiveness, and internal equity in thoughtfully assessing compensation.

The expected cash salary range for this role is $160,000 - $190,000 base.

Diversity & Inclusion at Pinwheel

At Pinwheel, we are committed to building an environment that is diverse and inclusive. We believe that having people across different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives enables us not only to build the best financial products, but to help us realize the best versions of ourselves. Pinwheel is an equal opportunity employer, and we aim to be an open and supportive place to work.