---
title: 'Backend Engineer at Layer'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-layer-san-francisco-d39j55sbwye9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Backend Engineer at Layer

- **Company:** Layer
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2025-04-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/layerfi/c8e4e1fb-eda0-4340-8d1e-f8b81a72f110

## Job description

## ABOUT LAYER

Over the last decade, a vibrant ecosystem of SMB software tools has emerged to help SMBs manage and run their businesses. These tools help SMBs with everything from payments to payroll, but accounting has lagged behind. Small business owners are still struggling with disconnected, generic, accounting software and expensive bookkeepers.

At Layer, we’re building a new kind of accounting software and bookkeeping that lives within the existing software tools SMBs use every day. Our platform allows software companies to quickly launch modern accounting software and bookkeeping services to their SMB customers, eliminating the need for them to use legacy accounting tools or bookkeepers.

## THE ROLE

We want engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a best-in-class product. We believe that certainly takes broad technical competence across our tech stack, but it also takes harder to find abilities, such as…

- Thinking forward from first principles and backwards from customer needs at the same time.
- Curiosity about both technical and business problems.
- Navigating competing priorities and tradeoffs using your own mental map of company goals.
- A desire for ownership in product & team decisions.
- Loving people and wanting to make your teammates around you better at their own strengths.

We think world class early-stage engineers often share some common background experience, such as:

- 2+ years of experience on strong software teams
- Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch
- A track record of growth in team leadership

That said, we deeply appreciate and admire people who take initiative to pursue problems & opportunities they care about, so we are always excited to meet folks who reach out even if they don’t fit that exact profile.

## OUR STACK

We don’t index on how familiar candidates are with our tech stack. That’s one of the benefits of hiring excellent engineers: we’re confident you’ll get up to speed and we’re confident the rest of the team can help you do it. That said, we want everyone to be excited about the environment and tool kit they’ll have on day one.

- API language: Kotlin
- Embedded components: React
- API framework: Ktor
- Database: Postgres (RDS)
- ORM: Exposed
- Testing: Kotest/JUnit
- CI/CD: Github Actions
- Deployment: Containerized ECS service behind API Gateway
- Monitoring/visibility/logging: Betterstack & Sentry

## OUR TEAM & CULTURE

## What we value in people

- Curiosity. Everyone, even startup vets, will have to learn on the job 90% of what it'll take to be successful. On top of that, everyone at Layer needs to learn accounting too. Thriving in this environment usually means having a natural curiosity for both people and systems.
- Enjoying the startup journey. Startups are hard no matter what, but they’re only as enjoyable as you make it. We are having fun and we don’t believe we can succeed as a team without that sense of fun, so it’s important that the whole team loves what they do each day both when success feels easy and when it doesn’t.
- Caring about the product and the user. We love small businesses. We love small business owners. We believe they’re important as people, their business outcomes are important, and that our product is a big part of creating those outcomes.

## BENEFITS

- Competitive seed-stage salary
- Top of market equity
- An employee friendly equity plan
- Health/dental/vision
- Lunch in-office

## About Layer

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Layer provides white-labeled embedded accounting software and AI-powered bookkeeping services that SMB platforms can offer directly inside their own products.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available (earliest funding round was pre-seed in May 2024)
- **Founders**: Justin Meretab (Co-founder & CEO), Daniel O'Neel (Co-founder & CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Embedded software products / Accounting technology
- **Target customers**: B2B – vertical SaaS platforms, horizontal SaaS platforms, and neobanks that serve small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)
- **Mission / Purpose**: Enable SMB platforms to offer dramatically better accounting software and bookkeeping that’s seamlessly embedded within the tools SMBs use every day.

## Products & Services
- **Embedded Accounting Software**: A complete accounting suite that replaces external tools like QuickBooks. White-labeled, customizable UI components and API allow platforms to offer bookkeeping, report generation, and reconciliation within their own interface.
- **Full‑service Bookkeeping**: AI-powered bookkeeping backed by a dedicated human bookkeeper for each SMB customer. Handles account reconciliation and produces complete financial reports each month. Layer claims it is “three times faster and 40% more accurate than traditional bookkeepers.”
- **Drop‑in Components**: Pre-built, customizable UI components that can be integrated in days with minimal engineering effort.
- **Platform & API**: Enterprise‑grade API for building custom accounting experiences.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total fundraising of $9.3 M (Seed round $6.6 M led by Emergence Capital, July 2025; Pre‑Seed $2.7 M led by Better Tomorrow Ventures, May 2024)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Emergence Capital (lead), Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV); Platform partners include Moxie, Nav, Dripos, Duet, & Carry (collectively onboarding over 30,000 SMBs)
- **Growth Signals**: 142.9% YoY headcount growth (12 employees); monthly headcount growth of 6.2%; actively hiring multiple engineering and GTM roles; expanding AI‑powered bookkeeping to new industry verticals

## Competitive Advantages
- **Embedded + White‑labeled**: Layer is the only solution that combines a full accounting software suite with a managed bookkeeping service that is completely white-labeled and integrated into the partner platform’s UX.
- **AI + Human Touch**: Machine‑learning automation paired with dedicated bookkeepers delivers faster, more accurate bookkeeping than traditional firms.
- **Bank‑grade Security**: Encrypted at rest and in transit, customer data isolated in a private cloud, and compliance with industry best practices.

## Strategic Focus
- Scale the AI‑powered bookkeeping service to a broader set of platform partners and industry use cases (e.g., coffee shops, healthcare practices, pet groomers).
- Expand the core accounting software capabilities.
- Continue vertical and horizontal market penetration among SMB serving platforms.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early‑stage fintech startup with a clear mission to reshape SMB accounting. The team is lean (12 people) with a technical majority (35% in engineering/technical roles) and a founder‑led environment.
- **Work Model**: Remote‑friendly roles available (Backend, Frontend, Fullstack Engineers are listed as remote). In‑office presence also possible in downtown San Francisco.
- **Growth Opportunity**: Join at a pivotal moment post‑Series Seed with strong backers; direct exposure to founders, AI product development, and go‑to‑market strategy.
- **Perks**: Not explicitly listed, but typical of well‑funded seed‑stage startups includes equity, flexible work, and a high‑impact role.

## Sources
1. [Layerfi.com - Overview](https://www.layerfi.com/)
2. [LinkedIn - Layer Financial](https://www.linkedin.com/company/layer-financial)
3. [Built In - Layer Careers & Culture](https://builtin.com/company/layer-0)
4. [Layer Blog - Seed Round Announcement](https://www.layerfi.com/posts/announcing-our-6-6m-seed-round-led-by-emergence-capital)
5. [Layer Careers Page (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/layerfi)

## Other roles at Layer

- [Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-manager-layer-united-states-79b0bzhv1dpa) — United States
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- [Frontend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/frontend-engineer-layer-san-francisco-qbtk584h0z1t) — San Francisco, CA
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