Sr. Backend Engineer, AI Projects

Pinwheel - Building the future of financial services in partnership with the biggest brands

"I love my banking app!" said no one, ever.

Pinwheel is on a mission to change that. We believe banks and financial service providers represent the greatest opportunity to build 10x better experiences, especially in the AI age. We're building the next generation of financial products alongside some of the biggest names in the market including Robinhood, DoorDash, Chime, Cash App, Credit Karma, American Express, Discover, Intuit, Acorns, Visa and more.

If you're excited by the idea of having your work touch and impact the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers, Pinwheel is the place for you.

If you get stoked about building products alongside the biggest brands in the world, Pinwheel is the place for you.

If you want to join a scrappy, hustling team that is obsessed with defining the future of financial services, Pinwheel is the place for you!

Pinwheel has raised $77M from top-tier investors such as Coatue, Notable, First Round, Upfront, Primary, American Express, Franklin Templeton, Indeed, Semper Virens and more.

Who are we looking for?

Pinwheel's Integrations Platform (IP) team builds the services, primitives, and tooling that make 1800+ integrations work at scale - proxy management, browser automation, identity flows, session handling, and the runtime that every Integrations Engineer (IE) builds on top of.

We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI-driven, platform-level problem spaces end-to-end, raise the technical bar, and make the Integrations Engineering team measurably more productive. You'll identify categories of recurring problems, design systems that eliminate them, and lead the execution alongside junior and mid-level engineers.

Pinwheel is a hybrid environment, with a 3-day in-office requirement here in our NYC headquarters, near Union Square.

What will you do?

• Own platform initiatives end-to-end: scope, design, build, ship, and maintain
• Drive systems design for new integration infrastructure, including services, queues, data pipelines, async workflows
• Lead projects staffed with junior and mid-level engineers; make them measurably more productive through code review, design feedback, and the systems you build
• Identify and eliminate classes of problems rather than patching individual one off bugs
• Set technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces
• Collaborate closely with IE and adjacent teams to ensure platform primitives meet real consumer needs

What qualifications are necessary?

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience
• Computer Science degree or comparable experience
• AI-forward thinking: you have set yourself apart from others in willingness to drive AI projects forward
• Strong systems design: your designs get adopted by peers; you can defend tradeoffs and anticipate failure modes
• Demonstrated autonomous project leadership: examples of owning ambiguous, multi-quarter projects from idea to business outcomes

Nice to haves

• Integrations experience: you've built against third-party APIs, dealt with auth flows, rate limits, and the operational reality of depending on external systems
• Browser automation experience (Selenium, CDP, Playwright): useful context for our integration surface
• Browser fingerprinting / detection work
• Experience designing and operating services that handle concurrency, failure modes, and meaningful scale
• Experience with backend platform / infrastructure: services, queues, data pipelines, async processing
• Expertise in Python
• Experience working in Fintech or comparable regulatory environment
• Track record of reducing oncall noise

Pay and benefits

At Pinwheel, total compensation is made up of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they can bring to the organization in delivering outsized results. The talent market is competitive, and maintaining our ability to recruit and retain the best team possible is a top priority for Pinwheel.

When creating an offer, we consider interview performance, candidate experience, external market competitiveness, and internal equity in thoughtfully assessing compensation. The expected cash salary range for this role is $160,000 - $200,000 base.

Benefits included

• Great compensation & equity packages
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Flexible PTO policy that prioritizes recharge and balance
• Paid parental leave
• 401K for retirement planning
• Mentorship opportunities
• Free Citibike membership
• Pet friendly offices and Zoom spaces

Diversity & Inclusion at Pinwheel

At Pinwheel, we are committed to building an environment that is diverse and inclusive. We believe that having people across different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives enables us not only to build the best financial products, but to help us realize the best versions of ourselves.