About Upstart

At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.

As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 1,800 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress.

We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City (opening Summer 2026), you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you.

If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.

The Team:

Upstart's Verifications Decisioning Engineering team builds the backend platform that powers automated verification workflows, financial data integrations, fraud detection, and approval decisioning across our lending products. The team develops the shared services and infrastructure that enable accurate, scalable, and reusable verification capabilities, helping improve automation, accelerate funding, and maintain risk correctness and compliance across the platform.

As a Software Engineer II (L4) on the Verifications Decisioning team, you will design and build backend services that power verification workflows and financial data platforms used across multiple lending products. You'll work on distributed systems that integrate third-party financial data providers, machine learning models, and internal decisioning services while partnering closely with Product, Machine Learning, Risk, Fraud, and other engineering teams to improve automation and platform scalability.

How you’ll make an impact

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services that power automated verification workflows, financial data integrations, and approval decisioning.
• Develop distributed systems, APIs, and event-driven services that improve the scalability, reliability, and reuse of verification capabilities across multiple lending products.
• Build platform capabilities that enable reusable financial data connections, streamline connection lifecycle management, and reduce operational overhead for internal engineering teams.
• Partner with Machine Learning, Product, Risk, Fraud, and Compliance teams to integrate data, decisioning logic, and risk models into production systems while maintaining correctness and auditability.
• Improve system reliability through comprehensive testing, monitoring, observability, and operational best practices for business-critical services.
• Contribute to the evolution of the verification platform by improving architecture, engineering standards, and shared infrastructure that accelerates product development across Upstart.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience) and 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of experience developing backend applications using Kotlin, Java, or another object-oriented programming language.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems, including service-to-service APIs and event-driven architectures.
• Experience building and maintaining scalable backend services that process business-critical or financial data in production environments.
• Experience contributing to decision engines that integrate with machine learning models to evaluate signals..
• Experience writing production-quality code supported by automated testing, monitoring, and observability practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of financial services, lending, fraud prevention, identity verification, or other risk-sensitive systems.
• Experience integrating third-party financial data providers or APIs such as Plaid or similar platforms.
• Experience building rule engines, workflow orchestration platforms, or automated decisioning systems.
• Knowledge of how machine learning models are integrated, monitored, and evaluated within production systems.
• Experience building reusable platform services or shared infrastructure supporting multiple engineering teams..

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are expected to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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