Member of Technical Staff (Backend, Rust)

The Role

For four years, our backend systems helped answer one question: should this company onboard this user? The clear cases were automated; the ambiguous ones went to a human who worked each case by hand. That's where the fraud worth catching tends to be.

Footprint's risk agent, Percy, goes after that queue: an agent that can do more in review than a person can, and faster. The identity verification platform underneath it was built for bounded request/response work, and now agent-shaped workloads ask different questions of it. There's little precedent to copy.

You'd span both worlds: the platform financial services run on today, and the agentic products we're building on top of it.

You'll report directly to the Head of Engineering - Elliott Forde.

What You'll Own

• API and service design. The Rust APIs and services powering verification, vaulting, and the checks Percy runs to investigate users for fraud.
• Product areas, end to end. A whole area becomes yours: data model, architectural calls, deploy.
• Systems that hold up to scrutiny. Our customers are banks and fintechs, and their auditors and security teams read what we build.
• The agent-shaped work. Percy's investigation services are the newest and least settled part of the backend.

Stack

• Rust
• Python
• Postgres
• Pulumi
• AWS

Must-Have

• 4+ years designing, building, and operating backend systems under real load.
• You've shipped and operated an API that engineers on other teams or outside your company build against.
• Privacy, security, and trust show up in your first design sketch.
• You reason clearly about tradeoffs and chase failure modes other people call unlikely.
• You've owned a service in production, including being the person paged for it.
• You've conceded your own design to a better one and shipped it.

Nice-to-Have

• Production Rust, or deep systems experience and a real desire to learn it.
• Background in real-world crypto.