Senior Software Engineer

Meadow is the modern payments platform for higher education that simplifies the entire student financial experience. We're transforming the $600 Billion higher education payments industry in the United States — building for universities what Shopify built for retail businesses, and bringing the entire student financial experience online.

The need for a platform like Meadow has never been greater. If you're passionate about our mission to empower students financially and strengthen economic mobility through higher education — and you're excited to join a highly ambitious, talented team — we'd love to hear from you.

Meadow is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale our student financial engagement platform, Meadow Pay. As we continue expanding to universities nationwide, this role will be critical in delivering reliable, scalable product experiences for our institutional partners and their students.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate core systems across our backend and frontend stack, partnering closely with Product, CX, and Integrations to deliver high-quality software. This role requires strong technical judgment, a high bar for quality, and a desire to take ownership of meaningful product areas from concept through production.

AI tooling (e.g. Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc.) is a core part of how our team works and ships code every day. We're looking for a Software Engineer who is excited to use AI as a core part of their workflow. The ideal candidate should have experience building products in a way that AI tooling can efficiently understand context and collaborate with the user.

This is a full-time position reporting to Mike, Meadow's Engineering Manager.

• You'll lead end-to-end development of product features from design through deployment and ongoing support.

• You'll architect and build scalable backend services and APIs (TypeScript/Node.js).

• You'll contribute to frontend development using modern frameworks (React preferred).

• You'll design systems with reliability, observability, and maintainability in mind.

• You'll collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, CX, and Integrations teams to deliver customer-facing functionality.

• You'll participate in code reviews and uphold high standards for code quality and system design.

• You'll improve engineering processes, tooling, and documentation to support scale.

• You'll help shape technical decisions and engineering culture as we grow.

• 5+ Years of Experience in Product Engineering

  • You have experience building and operating production systems at scale.

• Ownership

  • Builder Mindset: You demonstrate High Agency x High Urgency.

    • You own problems end-to-end.

    • You make consequential decisions that impact outcomes.

  • Agency: You make bigger calls on your own. You own the scope, approach, and tradeoffs for your projects without needing sign-off, and default to action when the path is ambiguous.

  • Decisions: The team trusts your call, as you are usually right. You estimate accurately and credibly, rarely make the same mistake twice, and correct fast when wrong.

  • Operational Excellence: You make operating our system a top concern. You instrument and document proactively, so things are debuggable and supportable before they break.

• Product Sense

  • Empathy: You keep a steady rhythm of contact with your users, external or internal (IE, CX), across your area: support tickets, integration issues, calls, telemetry. You understand the desired outcomes and surface patterns worth acting on.

  • Creativity: You form opinions on what to build, not just how. You generate and propose solutions to problems worth solving, including ones beyond their assigned work.

  • Taste: You judge which options actually move the needle on user outcomes and back them. You help teammates see defects and product-sense gaps, raising the bar around you.

• Technical Depth

  • Design & Architecture: You are trusted to lead engineering design on any project. You understand the why behind the architecture and see second-order effects, including how a component behaves as usage grows, and make calls that are not obvious to others.

  • Problem Solving: You anticipate the failure modes in your own designs and handle ambiguous, underspecified problems.

  • Tooling & Verification: You continuously encode your expertise for an agentic context with context files, evals, and patterns that keep generated code correct and on-spec.

  • Tech Debt: You identify systemic debt across your components. You write the spec/proposal for the whole project, get it prioritized, and lead execution.

• AI Fluency

  • You default to AI-first approaches where appropriate and have built workflows, tooling, or practices that improve output beyond just themselves.

  • You demonstrate strong judgment about tradeoffs and failure modes by choosing tools intentionally, validating outputs, and building review, testing, or mitigation into the workflow.

• Communication & Collaboration

  • You speak cross-functionally without jargon, making sure non-engineers understand. You balance technical, product, and CX tradeoffs in the moment and drive buy-in from all stakeholders.

  • You consistently and smoothly partner with Product and Design, and increasingly with CX and other internal customers, folding customer and support realities into your day-to-day work.

• Experience at an Early Stage Startup (Seed, Series A, Series B)

• Experience in FinTech (Or Other Regulated Industries)

• Experience as a People Manager and/or Technical Lead

We are a distributed team with offices in New York, NY and San Mateo, CA. For this role, we're currently seeking candidates based in the United States.

Please note that Meadow does not currently offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Meadow wants all employees to be supported in their personal and professional development, so we take a comprehensive approach to compensation and benefits.

The initial annual salary for this position is expected to range from $148,750-$215,000. Actual compensation will depend on numerous factors such as: experience, knowledge and skills, qualifications, location, and other job-related factors.

In addition to the chance to positively impact the world while building a company around a $600B opportunity, Meadow offers:

• Competitive Salary

• Competitive Equity

• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

• Subsidized Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance (with HSA & FSA Plans Available)

• Flexible Paid Time Off

• Paid Company Holidays

• Paid Parental Leave

• 1-2 Onsites Per Year

• Membership in an Ambitious, Kind, No-Drama Team

We believe in hiring resourceful, curious people who are eager to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with the job description, we encourage you to go ahead and apply. You may be just the right candidate for this role.

Meadow is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in all its forms, and we encourage our employees to participate as their authentic selves in our work environment. We strive to build better for all, towards a more open, inclusive space. Come as you are.