Senior Software Engineer
Senior full-stack engineer (back-end leaning) at Elective, a Vancouver Series A 'Learn Now, Pay Later' fintech. You'll shape architecture and build across checkout, underwriting, loan management, and public APIs on a TypeScript/Node/PostgreSQL stack with Temporal, in a hybrid role in downtown Vancouver three days a week.
- Compensation
- CA$128K–CA$158K / yr
- Location
- Vancouver, Canada
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 4+ years of full-stack experience, leaning back-end, with a product-centric mindset
- Strong TypeScript fundamentals (transferable from Go, Python, Java, or C#)
- Real Postgres depth: schema evolution on live tables, isolation levels, lock contention, query performance; no ORM experience
- Experience with asynchronous and long-running work: idempotency, retries, partial failure, out-of-order events
- Experience where the numbers had to be right: ledgers, reconciliation, billing, or payments
- Track record of making and owning product decisions you couldn't walk back
- Serious daily use of LLMs, with concrete judgment about where they help and where they fail
- Clear writing and ability to explain tradeoffs to non-engineering stakeholders (risk, finance, customer care)
- Opinions about how software should be built and willingness to argue them
- Comfort operating with autonomy in a regulated environment
- Legally authorized to work in Canada
- Able to be in the downtown Vancouver office three days a week
Nice to have
- Prior experience with Temporal
- Time in a consequence-aware domain (fintech, health tech, insurance, payments)
Full description
Elective is a Vancouver-based Series A fintech that has built the industry's first "Learn Now, Pay Later" solution designed to help world-class course creators, coaches, and educators sell more effectively. To date, Elective has supported over 100,000 consumers across North America investing in their education, all underwritten, funded, and serviced by Elective. The company has proven product-market fit with 8+ figures in revenue, more than doubling the business over the last 12 months, all profitably and without any dedicated sales or marketing spend.
As a Senior Software Engineer at Elective, nothing you build is invisible and you'll be in the room for planning, speccing, and debating architectural direction rather than just receiving it. Expect to be talking directly to the people who depend on what you ship: merchants, risk, finance, and customer care. This isn't a role where you inherit a stable codebase and a tidy backlog. You'll be working across a wide product surface, in a system where mistakes have consequences that show up on somebody's loan. If you've worked somewhere like this before and found it energizing rather than exhausting, you'll recognize the shape of it.
Ongoing Responsibilities:
- Contributing to the architectural direction. Helping set the new foundation, and planning the transition from the current system onto it.
- Working across the full product surface: checkout, merchant portal, risk and underwriting engine, loan management, and our public APIs.
- Designing for composition. Small pieces with strong contracts between them, built so the next person extends them rather than works around them. You'll be defining boundaries other engineers build against, and deciding when a shared abstraction is earning its keep and when it's just coupling two things that should have stayed apart.
- Building for correctness on money movement. Every payment, disbursement, and ledger entry either reconciles or we know precisely why it didn't. Failure cases, retries, and recovery paths — not just happy paths.
- Owning the third-party integrations we depend on: payment processors, bank rails, credit bureaus, KYC providers. A meaningful share of the job is other people's APIs and the ways they fail.
- Operating what you ship. When something fails in production at 6pm, an engineer figures out why, and that engineer is sometimes you.
- Building the compliance surface as product: audit trails, access controls, and the evidence a regulated lender has to produce on demand. Work you'll do, not a constraint you'll work around.
- Owning your work from architecture through deployment in six-week cycles built around focus, purpose, and real product accountability — following Shape Up fundamentals.
- Rotating onto Firequad, our bug-hunting and improvement team, for a full six-week cycle when you're not shaped onto a feature. It's how we keep the debt from compounding, and it's the fastest way to learn a system this wide.