Lead Engineer — Payments Platform (Laravel)

This is not generic "payments processing." It's educational finance with real teeth: interest that accrues daily, tuition sales tax that has to be applied and remitted correctly across jurisdictions, payments that split across dozens of periods, and chargebacks, refunds, and ACH returns that all have to unwind cleanly — across several payment facilitators, each with its own quirks. A one-cent or one-day error here isn't cosmetic. It's a school's income, a tax filing, or a borrower's trust.

To prove you have read this: tell us in your application what you would do with a golden banana.

There are no wrong answers, except not answering.

So the work rewards a specific kind of person: someone who's genuinely happy chasing a payoff that's off by a single cent until the ledger ties out and they can explain exactly why.

If that sounds satisfying rather than tedious, this is the role.

• That payments work. End to end, correctly, every time — across every contract shape, every allocation path, every reversal, and every facilitator. This is the spine of the role and the thing you are accountable for.
• A big voice in product direction. You have real influence over the roadmap and priorities for payments — where it goes next and which bets are worth making. You shape and argue for that direction rather than waiting to be handed it, even when the final call is a shared one.
• The full payments product — front end and money mechanics. The Livewire/Filament product experience borrowers and school staff actually touch, and the money engine underneath it. One person owns both, and the borrower-facing payment experience is yours to shape and reshape.
• A team of senior engineers. You lead it, set its direction, hold its standard, unblock it, and own its outcomes — and you decide who joins it and grow it as the platform scales.
• Payfac ownership. Multiple integrated payment facilitators kept correct and uninterrupted — webhooks, idempotency, capture/refund/chargeback semantics, settlement and split-transfer reconciliation, fees, and the migration passes that vendor version churn forces across live payment rows. Reconciliation jobs and dead-letter handling so a payment is never marked "completed" a moment before a chargeback lands.
• Bugs, issues, and production support — end to end. When something in payments breaks, it's yours until it's right. When a ledger won't tie out, the buck stops with you.
• Product planning and estimation. PRDs, scoping, and honest estimates — downstream of the product direction you set, not a substitute for it.

(Illustrative — to give you a feel for the domain.

Not a required checklist.)

• Introducing jurisdiction-specific sales tax on tuition plans across multiple allocation orders, keeping every balance and payoff tax-inclusive and reconciled against the reporting datamarts.
• Getting interest-bearing payment plans right: daily accrual, stable-principal fields, cap-aware per-period target amounts, and step precision on the edit form — so a multi-contract servicer always gets an accurate, non-stale payoff.
• Standing up a new payment-facilitator integration — webhooks, idempotency, settlement, capture/refund/chargeback semantics, and reconciliation — without disturbing the ones already live.
• Reshaping the front-end payment experience so schools and borrowers can actually understand what they owe and why, without losing an ounce of correctness underneath.
• Hunting down a multi-period allocation that sheds a penny on the last period and surfaces as an "unaccounted payment" on a tax report — and making sure it never happens again.

We are high-velocity, AI-native, and honest about the hard parts.

Agentic tooling is not a side experiment here — it's how we build.

We use it every day, from scaffolding to reasoning about gnarly money-math edge cases to shipping, and we expect the same from you and the team you lead.

We move fast, we tell the truth about what's broken, and we care deeply about the mission — because on the other side of every payoff quote and tuition payment is a real person building a real career.

• Front end: Livewire, Filament

• AI tooling (mandatory): Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, and the agentic workflow around them
• Finix
• Payabli
• Stripe
• Plaid

You'll work in a mature, well-tooled codebase with CI/CD, parallelized Pest, and a real AI-native development loop already in place.

Some of these are hard requirements — flagged as such.

All of them matter.

• Fintech experience — required. You've built and owned real money-movement or payments systems in production, and you know exactly how much can go wrong — why reconciliation, idempotency, and settlement matter, because you've felt the consequences of getting them wrong. This role is not the place to learn what a chargeback is.
• A love of the nitty-gritty of numbers. This is the temperament that matters most. You cannot rest while a payoff is off by a cent, a fee fires twice, a servicing-fee formula diverges between capture paths, or a grace-period boundary is off by a day — you'll chase that penny until the ledger ties out and you can explain exactly why, and you'll enjoy it. If a discrepancy makes you itchy, you'll fit right in.
• Deep Laravel and PHP expertise — hands-on and current, able to live in a large, gnarly codebase and hold a complex domain model in your head without flinching.
• A leader, not a baby sitter. You lead a team of senior engineers through direction, clear decisions, high standards, and accountability — and you stay deep in the code and the numbers because you own the result.
• Product instincts and ownership. You hold a point of view on where the payments product should go and drive it — not just implement someone else's spec.
• Fluent across the stack. Real front-end/product fluency (Livewire/Filament) alongside backend money-mechanics depth, third-party API integration (facilitators, webhooks, reconciliation), and sound database-design judgment for financial data.
• A daily AI-native workflow. You live in agentic tooling (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex) to plan, build, review, and ship.
• A shipping mindset. You get correct, reliable software out the door — fast, without breaking the ledger.
• 8+ years of relevant engineering experience, including leadership.

An accounting background is a major advantage.

If you read a ledger natively, think in debits and credits, and reason about how money is actually booked, recognized, and remitted — not just how it's computed — you will move faster and see problems earlier than someone who doesn't.

It's not an absolute requirement, but for this domain it's a significant edge, and we'll weigh it heavily.

• Real impact, real people. You own the system that collects the tuition that finances the American Dream for students at 400+ career schools. The correctness of your code is the difference between a school thriving and a student losing trust.
• Well-funded and proven. We raised a $10.7M seed round, backed by TTV Capital and Tusk Venture Partners, and back it up with results: 400+ career schools, 150,000+ students, across 48 states and 29 industries. Our platform drives 47% more completed applications, a 73.6% application-to-enrollment rate, 91% on-time tuition collection, and 21% higher retention.
• Remote-US, timezone-aligned. Work from anywhere in the country, on a team that overlaps when it counts.

• Compensation: 110,000–145,000 USD + Equity + Quarterly Performance Bonuses
• Unlimited PTO
• 401(k)
• Health / Dental / Vision — employer contribution up to $537.50/mo
• $200/mo tech stipend
• $100/mo wellness stipend
• Equity in a well-funded, fast-growing company
• Fully remote (USA), timezone-aligned