Backend Software Engineer

Self Financial is a venture-backed, high-growth FinTech company with a mission to increase economic inclusion and financial resilience by empowering people to build credit and build savings.

We’re looking for people who share our passion and are driven to tackle challenges, find solutions and make the financial space better for the communities we serve.

Our team is passionate about challenging the status quo of the credit industry by providing people accessible tools to take control of their credit. Executing on our mission requires deep collaboration across our teams to ensure our products reach the people who can benefit from them the most, particularly the 100 million+ Americans who have no or low credit.

This role is on our Credit Card team, which builds and supports the systems behind Self’s credit card products. Interviews will be conducted in-person out of our Austin, TX headquarters.

As a Software Engineer on Self’s Credit Card team, you’ll help build and maintain the services and APIs that power our credit card experience across Self Financial’s mobile app and web platforms, working alongside a high-performing team of engineers. Much of the team’s work involves integrating with the third-party partners and platforms that our credit card products depend on, so you’ll learn how external systems connect with our own and how to make those integrations reliable and secure. This role is a good fit for someone with a solid foundation in backend development who wants to grow their skills, take on more ownership over time, and learn from experienced engineers. You’ll contribute to backend services and APIs, build your understanding of distributed systems and scalability, and ship high-quality software in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with frequent releases.

We care deeply about creativity, quality, learning, and delivering reliable, secure systems to a large customer base.

• →Build and maintain backend services and APIs using Python, Flask, and FastAPI, taking on more ownership of your area of the system as you grow.
• →Implement REST endpoints consumed by web and mobile clients, learning to design for scalability and long-term maintainability.
• →Work with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) to model data, write efficient queries, and contribute to schema and indexing decisions.
• →Build and support integrations with third-party partners and services, including handling data exchange, error cases, and monitoring to keep them running smoothly.
• →Write clean, maintainable code, take part in code reviews, and use reviewer feedback to improve your work.
• →Follow and help uphold the team’s best practices for testing, security, performance, and safe releases.
• →Collaborate with Product, Design, Frontend Engineering, QA, and your engineering manager to scope and ship user-focused improvements.
• →Debug issues, explore unfamiliar parts of the codebase, and build your understanding of Self’s backend architecture.
• →Contribute to team rituals, documentation, and continuous improvement.

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, including work on backend services.
• Working knowledge of Python and a solid grasp of web application fundamentals.
• An understanding of REST APIs and how backend services communicate with clients and other systems.
• Comfort with Git and common software development workflows, including code review and collaborative development.
• A commitment to writing reliable, tested, secure, and maintainable code.
• Clear communication skills, the ability to manage your own tasks, and a habit of asking for help when you need it.

• Experience with Flask or FastAPI.
• Knowledge of the credit card or payments industry.
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs or external partner systems.
• Experience using agentic engineering tools (e.g., Claude, OpenAI/Codex, Copilot) to speed up development workflows.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience preferred.
• Experience with SQL and relational database design.
• Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS preferred), containers (Docker), or message queues.
• Curiosity and a track record of picking up new technologies quickly.
• Personal, professional, or open-source projects that show your backend skills.

Anticipated salary range for this level position: $105,000 - $130,000 annually. Individual pay and level is based on factors unique to each candidate, including skill set, experience, and other job-related reasons.