Portola · 5 hours ago
Founding Backend Engineer
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior LevelPortola is building the infrastructure layer that connects bank and fintech lenders to borrower platforms. They are seeking a Founding Backend Engineer to work directly with the founder on their loan origination protocol, handling everything from schema design to deployment in a high-ownership capacity.
Information Technology & Services
Responsibilities
You'll be working directly with the founder in a monorepo codebase that powers the core API, SDK generation pipeline, secure document exchange, and integrations with lenders and neobanks
You'll ship features end-to-end, from schema design to deployment, with real money moving through the system from day one
Qualification
Required
Strong TypeScript — not 'I've used it,' but you think in types. You understand generics, discriminated unions, and Zod's inference system
Experience designing and building APIs that external developers consume. You've thought about schema design, versioning, error contracts, and SDK ergonomics
Comfort with PostgreSQL and Prisma (or similar ORMs). You can write migrations, think about indexing, and reason about data modeling for financial systems
You've worked with queues, caching layers, and async job processing in production
You can read a monorepo, trace a request across packages, and understand how generated code fits into the system
You write tests. Unit tests, integration tests against real databases, end-to-end flows. Not as an afterthought
You've shipped production systems where correctness matters — fintech, payments, healthcare, anything where bugs cost real money
Preferred
Experience with OpenAPI spec generation or SDK codegen pipelines
Familiarity with cryptographic signing, JWTs, and API key authentication schemes
Exposure to crypto/blockchain concepts (ethers.js, stablecoins, on-chain settlement)
You've touched Next.js and can build internal tooling when needed
Experience with observability (OpenTelemetry, structured logging with Pino)
Company
Portola
We connect crypto platforms to bank and fintech lenders. Wallet users can access stablecoin-native credit.
Founded in 2025
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase