Job Description

EMPOWER OVERVIEW

Empower is a high-growth financial technology company on a mission to expand
access to fair credit to give anyone in the world the opportunity to improve
their financial security and mobility. We dream up and launch one-of-a-kind
features that help our members get money instantly whenever they need it, save
for the future, and rewrite their financial story. Our members see Empower
Cash Advance as a life-saver, Empower Automatic Savings as a game-changer, and
the new Empower Thrive line of credit as a lifeline to low-cost borrowing and
the only practical path to building good credit.

Empower México is a new venture for the company. We offer small loans ranging
from $150 to $2,000 MXN to help Mexican customers in a pinch, using non-
traditional data to underwrite customers.

Empower is backed by Sequoia Capital, Blisce, and Icon Ventures. Are we the
next great place to grow your impact and accelerate your career? We think so:

Inc. ranked Empower #56 in the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing
private companies in the US (#55 in 2022). Forbes put Empower on its 2023 list
of America's Best Startup Employers. Fast Company recognized the new Empower
Thrive line of credit in their 2022 list of the Next Big Things in Tech.

THE EMPOWER WAY
Great Expectations: We come up with bold, audacious goals for ourselves and go
all out for impact
Owner Mindset: We give every employee latitude to act independently, make
smart choices, and move the business forward
Spirited Debate: We love skeptics and seek counter opinions to challenge our
personal assumptions and expand our view
Customer Obsession: We listen to understand, empathize, and create a
memorable, rewarding experience for our community
Inclusive Collaboration: We believe diverse teams make the best decisions, and
we strive to give diverse voices a seat at the table
No Jerks Allowed: We value our relationships and take the time to build trust
and connection and communicate respectfully

WHAT EMPOWER OFFERS

Competitive salary
Generous equity package
Full healthcare and dental benefits
Technology expense reimbursement
Work from anywhere

JOB DESCRIPTION
As a Staff Backend Engineer for Empower Mexico, you will play a pivotal role
in shaping the technical direction of our solutions. You will identify
strategic technical needs, lead large-scale and complex product initiatives,
and optimize our engineering processes. You will also take ownership of
technological initiatives, from management and execution to solution design
and progress reporting. In addition, you will serve as a lead interviewer,
mentor other engineers, and lead incident responses. You will also own
technical ORKs for the Mexico business, serving as the driving force to
achieve them.

Your role will also involve designing, building, and deploying server
application code, implementing secure coding standards, and meeting sprint
goals. You will monitor the performance of our server application, participate
in the server ops on-call schedule, and work towards minimizing defects and
improving reliability.

This role has a high impact in creating and owning a full business solution
that is reliable, available and scalable, that meets our customer’s critical
loan needs. We are a .NET / Azure stack and are looking for .NET engineers
with strong experience with Azure.

Travel for company offsites is expected at a minimum 2 times a year.

Key Responsibilities

* Identify opportunities to foster optimal product direction, collaborate closely with business stakeholders to streamline and simplify designs, and proactively identify areas of risk and tradeoffs that can be enhanced.
* Interfacing the financial business system into the customer facing Empower México Android app and internal “Back of House” support portal
* Integrating with 3rd party services
* Ownership of technical initiatives, being accountable for the initiative's outcome, managing and executing the project, designing the solution and defining its requirements, reporting on the initiative's progress, and coordinating resources.
* Perform as a lead technical interviewer
* Lead technical reviewer of Empower Engineering blog posts
* Mentor Engineers up to and including Senior levels
* Lead SEV1 and lower incident response through to resolution
* Lead engineering of large scale and complex product initiatives
* Culture leader across the engineering organization, delivery team and platform team

Candidate Qualifications

* Minimum 10 years, ideally 15+ years developing web APIs within .NET (C#)
* Working experience with ORMs such as Entity Framework
* Working experience constructing and optimising RDMS queries
* Working experience within the asynchronous programming model
* Working experience with Azure solutions systems like Azure Functions and Azure Blob storage, and working knowledge of common .NET libraries like MediatR and Xunit for testing
* General knowledge of Messaging Queues eg. AMQP
* General knowledge of PaaS environments eg. Azure

Preferred Qualifications

* Worked on a “zero to one” project taking a business from an idea to a profitable venture
* Experience scaling a solution from tens of thousands to millions of customers (Scaling databases, queues, caching, monitoring and security with Azure)
* Contributed to and/or owned a large, complex, critical banking or lending solution

At Empower, we hire for people that push themselves to understand others and
seek out ways to challenge their personal assumptions. Our hope is that by
fostering such an environment, we strengthen our business and relationships by
putting people first. We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and
equitable workspace where everyone (regardless of age, education, ethnicity,
gender, sexual orientation, or any personal characteristics) feels like they
belong. Even if your experience doesn’t exactly match up to our job
description, you should feel empowered to apply regardless!

Skills:

Azure

Banking

Incident Response

Monitoring

Security

startup