Sr Staff Engineer Backend

Lendistry is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We consider applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or membership in any other group protected by federal, state, or local law.

If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at hr@ lendistry.com

Lendistry does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters, employment agencies, or staffing firms. To conduct business with Lendistry, a Master Services Agreement (MSA) must be executed and confirmed prior to submitting any information relating to a potential candidate. Without a signed MSA, Lendistry shall not be responsible to any individual or entity for any payment relating to any form of fee or compensation.

And, in the event that a resume or candidate is submitted by a recruiter, an employment agency, or a staffing firm without a fully executed MSA, Lendistry has the unrestricted right to pursue and hire any of those candidate(s) without any legal or financial responsibility to the recruiter, agency, and/or firm.

A Day in the Life

The   S r S taff Engineer, Backend   will architect and lead the distributed systems that power our lending operating system. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep systems design, complex business logic, and the realities of operating mission-critical services in a regulated industry.

You will drive architectural decisions across our multi-tenant, microservices-based platform — the systems that run the full loan lifecycle from origination and credit decisioning through contract execution, boarding, and servicing. You will set   the technical direction   for backend engineering, mentor and grow a team of engineers, and partner closely with frontend, product, QA, credit, and data teams to ship integrated, production-grade solutions that make capital move for small businesses.

Lendistry: Who We Are

We’re proud to be the nation’s largest minority-led, tech-savvy lender for small businesses and commercial real estate.  As a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and Community Development Entity (CDE), our mission is all about creating economic opportunities and fueling growth for small business owners and their communities.  Join us as we pave the way with innovative financing and financial education!

What You’ll Be Doing

You will be   the principal   architect of the backend systems that power Lendistry's lending platform, including:

-
Core lending services   — origination, application intake, decisioning orchestration, contract execution, boarding, and servicing handoff.

-
Credit and risk infrastructure   — the services that orchestrate underwriting workflows, external data providers, and internal scoring models.

-
Platform primitives   — multi-tenant identity, authorization, audit logging, workflow orchestration, and the shared APIs every product team consumes.

-
Integration fabric   — credit bureaus, KYC/KYB providers, bank cores, servicers, payment rails, and government program systems.

-
Operational backbone   — observability, resilience patterns, and the on-call and release discipline that let a small team safely run big systems.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

-
Own the backend architecture   of Lendistry's lending platform — service decomposition, domain boundaries, data ownership, inter-service communication, and the long-term evolution of the system.

-
Set the technical direction and best practices   for backend engineering — API design, language and framework choices, testing strategy, observability, and operational standards.

-
Influence the product and platform roadmap   across multiple services and integrations, representing backend engineering strategy at the organizational level.

-
Drive cross-functional initiatives   that span backend, frontend, data, credit, and compliance — the work that does not fit neatly inside one team.

Distributed Systems & Platform Development

-
Design and build complex, scalable backend services   in a microservices environment — production code that is high-quality, maintainable, performant, and safe to operate.

-
Design and implement RESTful APIs and service-to-service integrations , event-driven workflows, and asynchronous processing pipelines for long-running lending operations.

-
Own the core platform primitives   — multi-tenancy and tenant-aware routing, authentication and authorization,   caching , workflow orchestration, and shared infrastructure modules that every product team builds on.

-
Translate complex business and compliance requirements   — underwriting policy, SBA program rules, state lending regulations, investor and servicer contracts — into robust, secure, and auditable backend solutions.

-
Design for data integrity and auditability   — every state change in a loan must be traceable, reconcilable, and explainable to auditors, regulators, and partners.

Performance, Reliability & Operational Excellence

-
Diagnose   and   prevent   performance, scalability, and reliability issues   in production — database hotspots, N+1 queries, unbounded queues, retry storms, and the long tail of distributed-systems failure modes.

-
Advocate for and implement observability   — structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, meaningful alerting, and the runbooks that make on-call humane.

-
Harden security at the service layer   — authentication, authorization, input validation, secret management, and defense-in-depth for services handling PII and financial data.

-
Own the SDLC   — CI/CD, automated testing, code review, and release practices that let the team ship confidently and often.

Mentorship & Collaboration

-
Lead, mentor, and coach backend engineers   through architecture reviews, design docs, code reviews, and pairing — elevating the craft of everyone around you.

-
Collaborate closely with product and business partners , frontend engineers, QA, credit, and data teams to deliver integrated solutions rather than isolated services.

-
Raise the bar for engineering standards   — what good looks like, how we design, how we review, how we operate.

Innovation &   Future-Proofing

-
Stay current with emerging backend, cloud, and distributed systems technologies   and assess honestly what is worth adopting versus what is hype.

-
Research and pilot new tools and patterns   to improve developer velocity, platform reliability, and product capability — including the integration of AI tools into backend workflows.

-
Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence , continuous learning, and disciplined collaboration.

AI-Assisted Development Practice

Lendistry engineers are expected to be among the most effective users of AI tools in the company. This is not optional and it is not decoration — it is how we ship.

-
Daily use of AI coding assistants — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalents — as a standard part of the development loop for code generation, refactoring, testing, documentation, and review.

-
Clear judgment about when to trust, verify, or override AI-generated suggestions, particularly in security-sensitive and business-critical contexts.

-
Leadership in evaluating and adopting emerging agentic development tools, and in sharing learnings across Lendistry engineering.

-
Familiarity with agentic AI development concepts — multi-step task automation, LLM tool use, prompt engineering for code generation, and the integration of AI agents into engineering workflows.

Your Areas of Knowledge and Expertise

-
Builder mentality.   Bias toward shipping production systems; opinionated about architecture, pragmatic about tradeoffs.

-
Ownership.   Takes systems from concept through production, operates what you build, and owns the outcome.

-
Communication.   Writes cle