Software Engineer II, Marketplace Optimzation

Upstart is an AI lending marketplace focused on reducing the cost and complexity of borrowing for Americans. The Software Engineer II will design, build, and operate scalable backend systems for real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, offer selection, and monetization while enabling experimentation and improving marketplace efficiency. The role partners with product, machine learning, data science, capital markets, and lending teams to deliver reliable, business-critical systems.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend systems that power real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, offer selection, and monetization
• Build flexible platform capabilities that enable experimentation with allocation strategies, marketplace economics, and new monetization approaches while maintaining reliability and scalability
• Develop reliable, observable services that balance availability, latency, correctness, and operational simplicity across complex distributed systems
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Pricing Engineering, Data Science, Capital Markets, and Lending Partnerships to translate marketplace needs into effective technical solutions
• Make architectural decisions that simplify systems, reduce coupling across marketplace and adjacent platforms, and create reusable capabilities that support future marketplace innovation
• Use Generative AI tools thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and learning while maintaining ownership of technical decisions, security, code quality, and correctness

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) and 2****years of software engineering experience
• Experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend or distributed systems in production
• Experience developing production services using one or more modern backend programming languages
• Experience building and operating business-critical systems with demonstrated use of testing, monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis
• Experience designing production systems where reliability, availability, observability, and correctness are critical
• Experience with marketplaces, financial systems, recommendation or matching engines, optimization systems, or experimentation platforms
• Knowledge of low-latency, high-throughput distributed system design and architecture
• Experience partnering with machine learning or data science teams to integrate models or data-driven decisioning into production systems
• Experience with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, or Kotlin
• Ability to navigate ambiguous technical and business problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and collaborate across engineering, product, and business teams