---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer at Earnest'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-earnest-united-states-fec6edzpavtz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Staff Software Engineer at Earnest

- **Company:** Earnest
- **Location:** United States
- **Compensation:** $208k
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-05-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://app.careerpuck.com/job-board/earnest/job/7926350?gh_jid=7926350

## Job description

Earnest empowers ambitious professionals to make confident financial decisions and build the life they envision.

Earnies are committed to helping borrowers move forward with confidence by offering smarter borrowing options with a clearer path to taking control of their debt. If you’re as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let’s build something great together.

Earnest LLC – Oakland, CA

Title: Staff Software Engineer

Duties:

- The Staff Software Engineer (Multiple Positions Open) at Earnest LLC in Oakland, CA will drive the technical strategy and execution for our engineering teams.
- Lead the development of a scalable, high-performance lending ecosystem from customer onboarding to checkout.
- Architect and build customer-centric financial products, ensuring a frictionless and optimized user experience and orchestrating large-scale financial transactions.
- Define and execute the technical vision and best practices for a high-performing engineering team. Lead architectural decisions to enhance scalability, reliability, and efficiency of the lending platform.
- Collaborate with Product, UX, and Business teams to align technology with strategic goals. Design, build, and maintain customer-facing lending applications using Node.js, TypeScript, React/Redux, Angular, Sequelize, PostgreSQL, and Docker.
- Develop and optimize high-quality, testable code, implementing unit and integration tests with Mocha, Chai, Sinon, and Sequelize.
- Ensure performance, security, and scalability through best-in-class software engineering practices.
- Identify and resolve defects through debugging, profiling, logging, log analysis, tracing, and FullStory session replays.
- Oversee code deployment to Staging and Production environments.
- Partner with Quality Engineers to address issues found in testing and improve automated testing coverage.
- Lead and participate in Agile ceremonies. Break down product requirements into engineering deliverables in Jira.
- Review and provide critical feedback on Product Requirements Documents, Epics, and User Stories, influencing the technical and business roadmap.
- Recommend alternative technical solutions to optimize delivery speed, enhance customer experience, and reduce costs.
- Maintain technical documentation.
- Contribute to Earnest’s DevOps culture and participate in rotating on-call support for production applications.
- Position is 100% remote. Salary: $207,585 per year.

Requirements:

- Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related field, plus 3 years of software development experience.
- The 3 years of experience must include 3 years of experience with each of the following:
- building highly distributed micro services;
- SQL databases, including PostgreSQL, and caching, performance, monitoring, and scalability;
- server-side technologies, including Node.js, Typescript, and Javascript;
- client-side technologies, including React Native and Angular.
- Must include two years of experience with: AWS or similar cloud-based infrastructure; and leading the architecture, design, development, and deployment of large-scale projects.

This notice is subject to Earnest LLC's employee referral program.

Interested candidates can online at www.earnest.com/careers [earnest.com] or send a resume to directrecruiting@earnest.com and reference job code 058. Contact Chayna Eno at people@earnest.com if you have questions or need information about this application. A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.

Salary Range $207,585—$207,585 USD

Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits, including:

- Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
- Mac computers + work-from-home stipend to set up your home office
- Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
- 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
- Robust tuition reimbursement program
- $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world
- Competitive days of annual PTO
- Competitive parental leave

What Makes an Earnie:

At Earnest, our people bring our cultural principles to life. These principles define how we work, how we win, and what we expect of ourselves and each other:

- Every Second Counts: Speed is our competitive advantage. Our customers need better solutions, and the faster we execute, the greater our chance of success.
- Choose To Do Hard Things: We win by tackling the hard things that others avoid, fueled by grit and resilience.
- Pursue Excellence: Great companies, teams, and individuals never settle and are proud of the work that they do. What’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow. Excellence isn’t a destination; it’s a mindset of continuous improvement.
- Lead Together: Our success comes from how we work together. Leadership is not about titles—it is about action. We take ownership, drive results, and move forward as a team.
- Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously: We take our work seriously, not ourselves. The stakes are high, but a sense of humor keeps us grounded, creative, and resilient.

At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.

Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.

## About Earnest

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Earnest provides low-interest student loan refinancing, private student loans, and personal loans, using a modern, data-driven approach to assess creditworthiness beyond just a credit score.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Debt Financing Stage)
- **Headquarters**: Oakland, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: Louis Beryl, Ben Williams

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Financial Services (Fintech), Consumer Lending
- **Target customers**: B2C (ambitious professionals, students, and recent graduates), B2B (1,300+ university partnerships)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To make higher education accessible and affordable for everyone, and to help more people find financial independence by empowering them to make confident financial decisions.

## Products & Services
- **Student Loan Refinancing**: Consolidates federal and private student loans into one payment with flexible terms and no fees.
- **Private Student Loans**: New student loans for undergraduate and graduate programs.
- **Personal Loans**: Unsecured personal loans for life’s next chapter (e.g., moving, weddings, major purchases), with no fees and flexible repayment.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: $24 billion in total student loans refinanced; served over 420,000 clients.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Investors include Maveron, Battery Ventures, and other top-tier venture firms. Partners with 1,300+ universities.
- **Growth Signals**: Revenue estimated at $100M-$500M annually. Headcount grew 13.5% year-over-year to 221 employees. Named "Best Private Student Loan Lender" by U.S. News (2026), and recognized by Money.com and CNBC.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Merit-based underwriting**: Considers education, career trajectory, and financial habits (not just a FICO score) to offer lower rates.
- **No-fee philosophy**: No origination, late payment, or prepayment fees — a rare offering in the lending space.
- **Flexible repayment**: Eligible borrowers can skip a payment without penalty, a key differentiator for customer-centricity.
- **Speed and service**: Average customer support call wait time under 90 seconds.

## Strategic Focus
- **Growth through product expansion**: Moving beyond student loans to offer personal loans, aiming to serve customers at every life stage ("from debt to wealth").
- **Deepening university and employer partnerships**: Expanding the 1,300+ university network to drive new student loan origination.
- **Technology-driven efficiency**: Continued investment in data science, analytics, and engineering to automate underwriting and improve customer experience.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Guided by five principles: Every Second Counts, Choose to Do Hard Things, Pursue Excellence, Lead Together, and Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously. Emphasizes high ownership, speed, and resilience.
- **Remote-first**: Fully remote team with a $1,000 initial home office stipend and $100 monthly phone/internet reimbursement.
- **Perks**: $1,000 annual travel perk ("Earniversary"), generous PTO, no-meeting Tuesdays, annual company-wide offsites.
- **Benefits**: Dollar-for-dollar 401k match up to 5%, up to 12 weeks paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year.
- **Diversity & Inclusion**: Active Employee Resource Groups (BEE, PRIDE, LatinEST, FeminEST, E.A.S.T., WellnEST) with events like Drag Bingo and Financial Literacy workshops.
- **Engineering Culture**: Technical staff makes up 19% of the workforce. Recent open roles include Staff Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, and Analytics Engineer. Alumni go on to top tech firms like Google, Meta, Stripe, and Uber.

## Sources
1. [Earnest Careers Page](https://www.earnest.com/careers)
2. [Earnest About Us](https://www.earnest.com/about-us)
3. [Earnest Homepage](https://www.earnest.com/)
4. [Earnest Cultural Principles](https://www.earnest.com/principles)
5. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/earnest-llc)

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