Senior Staff Software Engineer (R14082)

ABOUT OPORTUN

Oportun (Nasdaq: OPRT) is a mission-driven financial services company that puts its members' financial goals within reach. With intelligent borrowing, savings, and budgeting capabilities, Oportun empowers members with the confidence to build a better financial future. Since inception, Oportun has provided more than $21.3 billion in responsible and affordable credit, saved its members more than $2.5 billion in interest and fees, and helped its members set aside an average of more than $1,800 annually.

WORKING AT OPORTUN

Working at Oportun means enjoying a differentiated experience of being part of a team that fosters a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture where we all feel a sense of belonging and are encouraged to share our perspectives. This inclusive culture is directly connected to our organization's performance and ability to fulfill our mission of delivering affordable credit to those left out of the financial mainstream. We celebrate and nurture our inclusive culture through our employee resource groups.

Engineering Business Unit Overview

The charter for Engineering group at Oportun is to be the world-class engineering force behind our innovative products. The group plays a vital role in designing, developing, and maintaining cutting-edge software solutions that power our mission and advance) our business. We strike a balance between leveraging leading tools and developing in-house solutions to create member experiences that empower  their financial independence.

The talented engineers in this group are dedicated to delivering and maintaining performant, elegant, and intuitive systems to our business partners and retail members. Our platform combines service-oriented platform features with sophisticated user experience and is enabled through a best-in-class (and fun to use!) automated development infrastructure. We prove that FinTech is more fun, more challenging, and in our case, more rewarding as we build technology that changes our members’ lives.

Engineering at Oportun is responsible for high quality and scalable technical execution to achieve business goals and product vision. They ensure business continuity to members by effectively managing systems and services - overseeing technical architectures and system health. In addition, they are responsible for identifying and executing on the technical roadmap that enables product vision as well as fosters member & business growth in a scalable and efficient manner.

Position Overview

The Sr. Staff Software Engineer role is a domain expert in multiple areas, in addition to being an integral member of the core technical leadership of the organization. The Sr. Staff Engineer weighs in on important technical decisions affecting the organization.

As a Sr. Staff Engineer, you mentor other Staff Engineers to increase their impact and abilities both within the org and across the company. You lead design, implementation and effective delivery to customers of multiple company-wide objectives and work well under pressure, respond with urgency and operate with a high degree of autonomy, accountability and maturity.

Strategic thinking is a default part of your execution. You identify, tackle, and deliver on strategically important problems at the organizational level - across Product, Platform and Infrastructure - and can recognize threats and opportunities impacting the organization, devise a strategy, and partner with everyone needed to execute on the strategy.

You are an evangelist who understands cost, effort, adoption, impact and related aspects, driving meaningful change across the technology group. The Sr. Staff Engineer is sought out for the techno-functional expertise in one/more areas by a large cross section of the engineering group, thereby making this role a model for well-rounded technical excellence in the entire engineering group. Overall, this Sr. Staff Engineer role is a step towards becoming part of a very small group of techno-functional experts who command respect across the entire organization for their leadership and impact to the overall technology group.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide senior technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, systems, and business domains.
• Drive architecture, design, and implementation of scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable software systems.
• Lead complex cross-functional technical initiatives from discovery and design through delivery and production operation.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Customer Experience, and business stakeholders to align technical solutions with business outcomes.
• Evaluate existing systems and identify opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, performance, maintainability, observability, and developer productivity.
• Design and guide implementation of backend services, APIs, integrations, platform capabilities, and distributed systems.
• Influence technical strategy, roadmap planning, and prioritization across teams.
• Establish and promote engineering best practices for architecture, code quality, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, documentation, and operational excellence.
• Serve as a technical mentor to engineers and technical leads, raising the bar for design quality, execution, and ownership.
• Help teams make sound technical tradeoffs across speed, quality, scalability, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Support modernization efforts, platform improvements, and integration strategies across legacy and modern systems.
• Use AI-enabled engineering tools, automation, and productivity solutions to improve development workflows, operational efficiency, and team effectiveness.
• Identify practical opportunities where AI-assisted tools or automation can improve customer experience, internal workflows, engineering productivity, or operational outcomes.
• Collaborate on systems that may include customer communications, telephony, contact center workflows, servicing platforms, or enterprise integrations.
• Participate in production support, incident review, root cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements for critical systems.

REQUIREMENTS

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven ability to provide technical leadership across multiple teams or complex domains.
• Deep experience with backend services, APIs, data flows, integrations, and cloud-based architectures.
• Proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Kotlin, or similar.
• Strong understanding of system design, software architecture, scalability, reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, logging, alerting, and production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without relying solely on authority.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring engineers and helping teams improve technical execution.
• Strong ownership mindset and ability to drive ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives to completion.

Strongly Recommended

• Experience using AI-enabled tools, copilots, automation platforms, or intelligent productivity solutions to improve engineering workflows.
• Practical understanding of how AI tools can support software development, knowledge discovery, documentation, testing, operational support, or workflow automation.
• Ability to evaluate where AI-assisted solutions are useful, where they are not appropriate, and how to apply them responsibly in an enterprise environment.

Preferred

• Experience with telephony, contact center platforms, IVR, call routing, voice systems, customer communications, or customer engagement technologies.
• Experience with platforms such as Twilio, Amazon Connect, Genesys, Five9, NICE, Cisco, Avaya, or similar technologies.
• Experience integrating with third-party SaaS platforms, vendor APIs, or enterprise systems.
• Experience in fintech, financial services, lending, risk, servicing, collections, customer support, or regulated environments.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems and improving reliability of business-critical platforms.
• Experience evaluating emerging technologies and applying them pragmatically to business or engineering problems.

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We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and consider all qualified applicants for employment opportunities without regard to race, age, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other category protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate.

California applicants can find a copy of Oportun's CCPA Notice here:  https://oportun.com/privacy/california-privacy-notice/.

We will never request personal identifiable information (bank, credit card, etc.) before you are hired. We do not charge you for pre-employment fees such as background checks, training, or equipment. If you think you have been a victim of fraud by someone posing as us, please report your experience to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).