Cardless
Backend Software Engineer (Senior/Staff)
San Francisco · Staff+
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$5,131 more — $165,131 — moves this role to Level II and 2 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $165,131 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- Engineers who reason well about complex systems pick up the domain quickly.
- Prior experience in payments or lending is a meaningful advantage, but we'd rather bet on how you think than on what's already on your résumé.
- Most fintech backend jobs mean inheriting a mature system and keeping it running.
Responsibilities
- Design and build backend systems that move real money, make credit decisions, and serve hundreds of thousands of cardholders
- Take projects from ambiguity to production: scoping, design, implementation, testing, rollout, and the operational life that follows
- Partner with product, risk, compliance, operations, and our partner and vendor counterparts to ship things that hold up in a regulated environment
- Experience building and operating production backend services, with a track record of shipping projects end to end
- Mid-level: You own well-scoped features and services end to end, and you get faster at handling ambiguity with support from senior engineers.
- Senior: You own large, ambiguous projects from design through operation, set the technical approach for your area, and raise the bar for the engineers around you.
- Cardless is building the infrastructure for the world's best companies to design, build, and launch financial products.
- Companies like Coinbase and Bilt use Cardless to create credit cards that feel entirely their own.
- ✈️ Team building events & happy hours
- We're in the office at least three days a week, and most of us are there more than that, because we do our best thinking and building together in person.
Requirements
- You can reason about an unfamiliar system, find where it breaks, and make a sound call with incomplete information
- Proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem.
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Step Functions) or event streaming
Compensation
- This role has an annual starting salary range of $160,000 - $295,000 + equity + benefits (see below).
- Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience, and specific work location.
Benefits
- We're proud to offer our team excellent benefits:
- 💸 Meaningful Start-up equity
- 🏥 100% health, vision & dental primary coverage
- ➕ 75% health, vision & dental dependent coverage
- 🚎 $250/month Commuter benefit
- 👶 Parental leave
- 🌴 Flexible PTO with a minimum of 15 days off per year
- Improve reliability, observability, and developer experience as you go, and leave each system better than you found it
Company info
- We're looking for kind, humble people with high standards and low egos.
- We are primarily Java with Python for data work, and we do not expect you to have used ours - Clear communication and genuine care about correctness.
- We're looking for someone who's genuinely excited to be there alongside the team.
- Engineers who want their work to shape what a company becomes, rather than just keep it running, will find few roles like it.
This listing is sourced directly from Cardless's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.