Member of Technical Staff (Backend, Rust) at Footprint in New York, NY

Footprint is the agentic platform that learns your compliance program and runs it end to end.

Compliance teams at banks and fintechs are drowning in financial crimes investigations. Transaction volumes are surging, regulators keep raising the bar, and the work still runs on manual review queues stitched together from legacy vendors. Percy, our agentic system, learns each team's procedures and makes the same calls their analysts would: clearing false positives, escalating real risk, writing the case narrative, and documenting every decision for audit. It cuts review workloads by 70%+.

The harder problem is underneath. Every investigation is grounded in the data sources compliance teams already trust, and every case commits to an organizational memory that compounds — so a pattern one analyst caught in March surfaces automatically in October, across KYC, EDD, sanctions, and monitoring. Whether the team is five analysts or 500, they share one brain. Every memory carries provenance. Agents propose; humans approve. That's four years of identity infrastructure sitting under the agent, and it's the part nobody can bolt on later.

We're backed by QED, Index, and Box Group, and trusted by FDIC- and OCC-regulated banks plus fintechs like Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. We 5x'd revenue last year. The team is small, senior, and ships fast.

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. These are the surfaces our customers' products call directly, which makes the design decisions hard to take back
• Product areas, end to end. A whole area becomes yours: data model, architectural calls, deploy. You take features from ideation through production with design and frontend, and you're in the planning conversations that decide which ones happen
• Systems that hold up to scrutiny. Our customers are banks and fintechs, and their auditors and security teams read what we build. Correctness, reliability, and the security posture of your services are yours to set and defend
• The agent-shaped work. Percy's investigation services are the newest and least settled part of the backend. What excellence looks like here is still being decided, and you'd be one of the people deciding it

Stack

Rust · Python · Postgres · Pulumi · AWS

Deep experience with most of this, and the judgment to pick up the rest, is what matters.

Must-Have

• 4+ years designing, building, and operating backend systems under real load - including debugging them when they broke
• You've shipped and operated an API that engineers on other teams or outside your company build against, and handled the compatibility problem when it had to change
• 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. The backend is Rust, so this is what decides how quickly you're productive in it
• Background in real-world cryptography or systems security. We vault identity data on behalf of banks and fintechs, so this counts for a lot here
• Experience designing APIs or SDKs used by external developers - ours are the product customers integrate, and those decisions are hard to take back once someone has shipped against them
• Familiarity with KYC and identity verification. It shortens the ramp on why the checks are shaped the way they are

Success Looks Like

90 Days: A product area is yours and you've shipped to the APIs customers integrate: agent memory, self-improving agents, or new verification capabilities. The team routes that area's architectural questions to you.

1 Year: You've architected and delivered a major platform capability, you actively shape what we decide to build and how we build it, and the team's engineering standards are higher because you're on it.

Why Join Footprint

• Massive impact, fast: You'll work on projects that shape company direction, not analysis that gets shelved.
• Own meaningful work: From day one, you'll have direct ownership over strategic initiatives that drive the business forward.
• Real growth opportunity: Promotion timelines depend on performance: the harder you work, the quicker you'll get promoted.
• Winning team and culture: We're a fast-moving, no-BS team that likes to win (and have fun doing it).

Benefits

• 💰 Generous compensation and equity packages
• 🍽 Free lunch and dinner (after 7pm)
• 💪 Monthly wellness stipend
• 🏖 Unlimited PTO
• 🏥 Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance
• 🚀 The chance to help shape the future of internet identity and financial crime prevention