Staff Software Engineer

Building at Check

At Check, we make paying people simple. In doing that, we’re not just building our own business— we’re building payroll businesses together with every one of our partners. As the inventors of embedded payroll, we’re redefining how people get paid and making it easier for payroll businesses to launch, grow, and thrive. Check out the full story | Tune in.

Check is far more than just API infrastructure. We’re a springboard for building and scaling payroll businesses.

Our Team

Payroll is broken. Come fix it alongside a team that’s as passionate as you are! At Check, you'll use creative problem-solving, critical thinking, and grit to impact every business we build. We view problems to solve and jobs to be done as opportunities to contribute to the solution; we ignore conventional role boundaries in favor of the unique strengths and value each builder brings to our team and to our mission.

Join us if you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and redefine payroll. Let’s simplify the complex, make a real impact, and create a better future for businesses of every size.

The Work

At Check, you’ll merge your engineering know-how with your passion for making a real impact. We build using cloud-native tools managed by IaC, running a Python modular monolith that employs the best principles of distributed systems while maintaining the simplicity and ownership of a mono-repo. Our stack builds on traditional HTTP API paradigms and durable asynchronous execution frameworks to orchestrate complex and dynamic background jobs to do everything from moving money to filing taxes.

In this role, you will:

• Actively make Check better by working hands-on with our gnarliest problems across engineering teams.
• Build prototypes for creative solutions to fail fast and expedite future development.
• Share hot takes and candid, constructive feedback on ways we make our team or platform better.
• Coach your team by building genuine connections, embracing vulnerability, and working transparently.
• Simplify how and what we’re building by shaping the system’s architecture.
• Role model clear, critical thinking through code, written proposals, or diagrams that illuminate problems and set direction
• Architect and build scalable systems and services within our mono-repo , while taking ownership of end-to-end delivery from design to deployment.

Our Stack: 

• Python/Django for our API
• React and Typescript for our frontends
• AWS and Terraform for our cloud infrastructure
• Postgres for our database
• Temporal for workflow orchestration
• GitLab for issue tracking and CI/CD

Tools for the job:

• Experience with staff level ownership and impact across an organization
• Experience building complex systems (or within a regulated industry) that have scaled and changed over time
• Resiliency solving highly ambiguous problem or creating structure for collaboration
• Proficient in debugging complex systems and handling critical incidents
• Experience setting a technical strategy across teams
• Proficiency in Python or Go (Django, React or Typescript is a plus)

Travel and Office Policy:

Building Together on Common Ground. The Check team is distributed across the US, and we have offices in New York City and San Francisco. While we embrace remote work, time together in person is where we do our best work. We offer ample opportunities and encourage employees to attend team offsites, events, and hackathons a couple of times a year! We expect all employees to attend our annual 3-day company retreat in the fall.  

For our in-office and hybrid employees, our offices are open all week. We provide meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the team hosts regular happy hours, game nights, etc.

What we offer:

For full-time employees, Check offers company-sponsored medical, dental, vision, short-term/long-term disability, and basic life insurance coverage, effective on their first day of work. We also provide stock options, flexible PTO and sick leave, 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, flexible return-to-work, 9 annual holidays, a 401k retirement plan, and a $100 monthly stipend for home internet and mobile phone expenses.

The actual annual salary for this role depends on each candidate’s experience, qualifications, and work location. Most new hires are placed near the midpoint of this range to ensure fairness with our existing team’s compensation. 

• In San Francisco, NYC, LA, and Seattle, the expected range is between $218,900 and $234,200.
• For all other locations, the expected range is between $186,065 and $199,100

We accept applications on an ongoing basis with no specified deadline.

Check is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Check is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process.

Check participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information from all new employees to confirm that they are authorized to work in the U.S. Check does not use E-Verify to pre-screen applicants.