---
title: 'Lead Engineer- 99Pledges at Beacon Software'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-engineer-99pledges-beacon-software-san-francisco-381n9b1f3mhp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Lead Engineer- 99Pledges at Beacon Software

- **Company:** Beacon Software
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/beaconsoftware/4207cf49-5a43-48f5-a39f-afdae184819d

## Job description

The Business 99Pledges runs peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns for K-12 schools and youth sports organizations: walk-a-thons, jog-a-thons, read-a-thons. It processes around $100M in donations a year and serves roughly 5,700 organizations. It is profitable and growing, and it is the largest business in Beacon's education technology portfolio. Beacon buys established vertical software companies and puts real engineering leadership into them. Our engineers embed in one business and own its technology.

## The Role

You would be the only engineer on 99Pledges. Architecture, deploys, incidents, vendor calls, and prioritization all sit with you. There is no one to hand work to, so the job rewards people who automate aggressively and pick their battles.

## What You'll Do

- Set the roadmap. With the GM, the product team, and customers, decide what gets built. Turn business priorities into a sequenced plan and explain the tradeoffs.
- Get the money right. Donations, automatic payouts, and reconciliation across several payment providers. Retries, idempotency, webhooks, and handling a provider that degrades in the middle of a campaign.
- Put AI into the product. Move from plan to production: evals, guardrails, tenant-safe tool use. Know when a foundation model is the right call and when a deterministic pipeline is.
- Use AI on your own work. You are one person, so your output is the limit. We expect coding agents to be part of how you work day to day.
- Raise the engineering floor. Trunk-based development, working CI, a staging environment on synthetic data, feature flags, real test coverage, and a deploy process that does not depend on your memory.
- Write it down. Leave a codebase, tests, and docs that a second and third engineer can pick up quickly. If the business grows, that hire is the next conversation.
- Handle fraud and abuse. Fraud detection, device fingerprinting, and the work that keeps donors and schools safe.
- Watch the cost line. Read cloud and vendor spend, find what is wasted, and judge whether fixing it is worth the time.
- Talk to non-engineers. Operators, school administrators, and partners will come to you directly.
- Hold the pager and own uptime. Availability is yours. 99Pledges earns in short scheduled bursts: a school's walk-a-thon happens on one specific day, usually a weekend, and donations lost to an outage during it do not come back later. You own the alerting that catches problems before organizers do, the response when something breaks at 7am on a Saturday, and the follow-up that stops it recurring.

## What We're Looking For

- A senior generalist. You move across web, data, infrastructure, and AI, and you pick up unfamiliar stacks quickly.
- Production experience handling money. Payment integrations, payouts, reconciliation, or fraud work, and familiarity with how these fail. This is the requirement we bend on least.
- Sole ownership of something real. You have been the only engineer, or the clear technical owner, on a system that mattered: design, build, deploy, on-call, and the customer call when it broke.
- Postgres depth. You can model, query, and tune production Postgres, and you have run migrations against large tables without downtime.
- Shipped LLM features to production. Retrieval, tool use, evals, guardrails. Prototypes do not count.
- A track record of fixing engineering process. You have introduced trunk-based development, automated testing, and environment discipline to a codebase that lacked them, while still shipping.
- Judgment about technical debt. You can tell which debt is costing money and which is just unpleasant to look at.
- Clear writing. Working alone, writing is how everyone else knows what is happening.

Tech Stack

- Backend: Ruby on Rails 7, Ruby 3.1
- Database: PostgreSQL (production), with careful attention to migrations and denormalized/calculated fields for performance
- Frontend: HAML, SCSS, Bootstrap, jQuery
- Background jobs: Delayed Job (Active Record backend)
- Payments: Braintree, PayPal, Dwolla, Stripe
- Infrastructure: Heroku, AWS S3, Redis
- Email: Postmark
- Monitoring: Honeybadger (errors), New Relic (performance), Datadog (migrating to)
- Analytics/experimentation: PostHog

## Why Join Us

You'll work on software that helps organizations raise money for causes they care about, with a small team where your work has direct, visible impact on both the product and the people who depend on it.

## Our Values at Beacon Software

- Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time.
- Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant.
- Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected.
- Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process: To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.

AI does not make hiring decisions: Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.

## About Beacon Software

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Beacon Software is a permanent holding company that acquires and grows mission-critical software businesses serving Main Street and the real economy, providing a centralized platform of engineering, AI, and operational expertise.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Toronto, Canada (with offices in New York City and San Francisco)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Nilam Ganenthiran (Founder & CEO) and Divyahans Gupta (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Software Development; Vertical SaaS for essential industries (e.g., campground management, municipal government, dance competitions, event management)
- **Target customers**: B2B – small-to-medium businesses and organizations that rely on mission-critical software; also enterprise-level customers through acquired companies
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Beacon is the permanent home for Main Street software and services supporting the real economy.”

## Products & Services
- **Permanent Holding Model**: Beacon acquires software companies outright and holds them forever, keeping the brand, team, and customers intact.
- **Integrated Operating Platform**: Provides acquired companies with shared resources including in-house engineering, AI, design, fintech expertise, back-office automation, and growth playbooks.
- **AI & Technology Enablement**: Leverages an AI platform to help portfolio companies ship faster, automate administration, and expand market share (e.g., collaboration with OpenAI to bring AI certifications to 500,000 Main Street workers).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $250 million Series B (November 2025) led by General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and D1 Capital; previous rounds undisclosed but backed by experienced operators.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, D1 Capital; strategic advisors include Farhan Thawar (Shopify), Euan Blair (Multiverse), Nikila Srinivasan (Meta), Dani Dudeck (Instacart), Sagar Sanghvi (AbridgeAI), Will Petrie (Ramp), and Rob Crisci (Lineage Logistics).
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 63 employees with +9.3% monthly headcount growth
  - 25 active job postings across engineering, product, legal, and AI roles
  - Acquired E2E Soccer Limited (April 2026)
  - Annual revenue estimated at $7.8M [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/beaconsoftware)
  - High-profile hires from Instacart, Databricks, Sequoia, and Constellation Software

## Competitive Advantages
- **Permanent ownership model**: Unlike private equity, Beacon does not flip companies – it holds them forever, aligning long-term incentives with founders and customers.
- **Integrated platform at portfolio scale**: Acquired businesses gain immediate access to a centralized engineering bench, AI tools, design, and GTM resources that would otherwise be out of reach.
- **Founder-centric deal structure**: Beacon uses its own capital to close within 60 days and tailors terms to each founder, preserving the acquired company’s name and team.
- **Network effect**: Access to a broad ecosystem of seasoned operators, investors, and advisors across Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Main Street.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand portfolio through disciplined acquisitions**: Target essential software businesses with strong product-market fit and loyal customers in verticals like local government, recreation, and professional services.
- **Deepen AI integration**: Continue building AI capabilities across the platform (e.g., automation of administrative tasks, AI certifications) to drive growth and efficiency for portfolio companies.
- **Scale the operating platform**: Hire top-tier engineering, product, and operational talent to build a “common layer” that compounds across every owned business.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: Beacon emphasizes a long-term mindset (“Horizon”), relentless execution (“Hunger”), truth-seeking (“Honesty”), and continuous learning (“Humility”). The team is described as ambitious, driven, and humble.
- **Work Environment**: Remote-friendly with hubs in Toronto, New York City, and San Francisco. Some roles may require in-office presence (e.g., NYC).
- **Impact at Scale**: Engineers and product builders work on software that affects thousands of essential businesses and their customers – every project lands across the entire portfolio.
- **Career Growth**: Early-stage startup energy with strong financial backing; opportunity to shape the platform from the ground up alongside experienced operators.
- **Notable Perks**: Access to a world-class network of advisors, high-autonomy culture, and the chance to work on “real industry” problems that matter.

## Sources
1. [beacon.inc](https://beacon.inc/) – Company overview, values, and operating model
2. [beaconsoftware.com/team](https://beaconsoftware.com/team) – Founder background, advisors, and leadership
3. [beacon.inc/careers](https://beacon.inc/careers) – Careers page with culture and hiring philosophy
4. [linkedin.com/company/beaconsoftware](https://www.linkedin.com/company/beaconsoftware) – Financials, headcount, employee growth, and recent announcements
5. [builtin.com/company/beacon-software](https://builtin.com/company/beacon-software) – Job postings and office locations

## Other roles at Beacon Software

- [Director - Governance, Risk, Compliance & Privacy (GRC)](https://feeny.ai/job/director-governance-risk-compliance-privacy-grc-beacon-software-san-francisco-5ak3drpet3cd) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-beacon-software-toronto-hm4pg5e89hjd) — Toronto, Canada
- [Product Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-beacon-software-san-francisco-h39qmxvyd65b) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-beacon-software-new-york-j3f8jbdzmx8r) — New York, NY
- [Director, Association Partnerships & School Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/director-association-partnerships-school-growth-beacon-software-united-states-scfpzwz2j3th) — United States
- [Member of GTM Staff - San Francisco](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-gtm-staff-san-francisco-beacon-software-san-francisco-0e9dmxt4st0r) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of GTM Staff - Toronto](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-gtm-staff-toronto-beacon-software-toronto-csqthabvp7vf) — Toronto, Canada
- [Member of GTM Staff - New York](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-gtm-staff-new-york-beacon-software-new-york-cfnxry0cdjyc) — New York, NY
- [Tech Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/tech-lead-beacon-software-toronto-58etjxs5ah5b) — Toronto, Canada
- [Staff/Lead Application Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-lead-application-security-engineer-beacon-software-san-francisco-jd9rfp7nzg21) — San Francisco, CA