{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"17bf778d90d54d8863aaa857","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/17bf778d90d54d8863aaa857","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/17bf778d90d54d8863aaa857","title":"Founding Engineer - GovTech","description":"Founding Engineer - GovTech\nLocation: San Francisco, CA (In-Office)\n\nPartnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup to appoint a Founding Engineer to build, from close to zero, the infrastructure behind a brand-new category of public-sector fintech.\n\nAbout the Company & The Mission\nEQL Tech is proud to represent a highly ambitious, well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds).\n\nThe $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life’s work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.\n\nThe Team\nYou will be joining an in-person company, working together in the office.\n\nThe Founders: The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together. One previously worked as a Quant at Goldman Sachs, and the other built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally, serving 1M customers/day at age 19.\n\nThe Core Team: You will work alongside top talent, including a founding engineer who did AI research at MILA and at Elon Musk’s SpaceX school, a Head of Risk from Mercury, Stripe, and Circle, a Payments Engineer from Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Director at Arizona’s ESA department — who will be one of your closest collaborators when it comes to what state agencies actually need from this system.\n\nThe Role: Founding Engineer, GovTech\nThere is no existing playbook for moving billions of dollars of state-administered education funds through a consumer card product — you will be one of the people who writes it. As Founding Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company’s stack, from card issuing to disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting, and you will make the architecture calls yourself rather than inherit someone else’s system. This is a founding seat working directly alongside the co-founders, not a slot on an existing infra team.\n\nAs Founding Engineer, you will:\n\nPayment Systems Architecture : Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up. Make the architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.\n\nDesign a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.\n\nBuild high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.\n\nMinimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.\n\nLedger Integrity Reconciliation: Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing. You will build the automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, because none exist yet.\n\nRequirements\nYour Profile\n\nBuilds From Zero: You’d rather design the first version of a system than optimize someone else’s. You’re comfortable making the call when there’s no precedent to point to.\n\nObsessive About Correctness: You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis. Retries don’t erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives — the database.\n\nAssumes the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors change APIs without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway.\n\nCraves Ownership: You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving. You’re not looking to contribute to a system — you want to have engineered it.\n\nAble to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)\n\nExperience with Lithic , Column , LoanPro , Stripe Issuing , or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus\n\nBenefits\nCommitment, Compensation & Benefits\nThis will be a big commitment, and we’re aiming high. It needs to be something you are energised about taking on, or this isn’t the team for you.\n\nCompetitive Salary: $125,000 – $175,000 per year, commensurate with experience.\n\nGenerous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.\n\nTop-Tier Backing: We’ve raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels.\n\nRelocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA, or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to visit customers. We’re an in-person company and are in the office together.\n\nComprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.\n\nUnmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year).\n\n#J-18808-Ljbffr","company":"Eql Tech","rawCompany":"eql tech","city":"Millbrae","state":"CA","isRemote":false,"isActive":false,"createdAt":"2026-07-19T03:14:29.214Z","occupations":[{"code":"15-1299.08","title":"Computer Systems Engineers/Architects","slug":"computer-systems-engineers-architects"},{"code":"15-1252.00","title":"Software Developers","slug":"software-developers"},{"code":"17-2199.00","title":"Engineers, All Other","slug":"engineers-all-other"}],"industries":[{"code":"513210","title":"Software Publishers","slug":"software-publishers"},{"code":"541511","title":"Custom Computer Programming Services","slug":"custom-computer-programming-services"},{"code":"522320","title":"Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities","slug":"financial-transactions-processing-reserve-and-clearinghouse-activities"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Founding Engineer - GovTech","description":"Founding Engineer - GovTech\nLocation: San Francisco, CA (In-Office)\n\nPartnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup to appoint a Founding Engineer to build, from close to zero, the infrastructure behind a brand-new category of public-sector fintech.\n\nAbout the Company & The Mission\nEQL Tech is proud to represent a highly ambitious, well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds).\n\nThe $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life’s work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.\n\nThe Team\nYou will be joining an in-person company, working together in the office.\n\nThe Founders: The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together. One previously worked as a Quant at Goldman Sachs, and the other built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally, serving 1M customers/day at age 19.\n\nThe Core Team: You will work alongside top talent, including a founding engineer who did AI research at MILA and at Elon Musk’s SpaceX school, a Head of Risk from Mercury, Stripe, and Circle, a Payments Engineer from Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Director at Arizona’s ESA department — who will be one of your closest collaborators when it comes to what state agencies actually need from this system.\n\nThe Role: Founding Engineer, GovTech\nThere is no existing playbook for moving billions of dollars of state-administered education funds through a consumer card product — you will be one of the people who writes it. As Founding Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company’s stack, from card issuing to disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting, and you will make the architecture calls yourself rather than inherit someone else’s system. This is a founding seat working directly alongside the co-founders, not a slot on an existing infra team.\n\nAs Founding Engineer, you will:\n\nPayment Systems Architecture : Design and own a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs, from the ground up. Make the architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including card issuing infrastructure, processor integrations, and fraud and credit risk controls.\n\nDesign a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.\n\nBuild high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.\n\nMinimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as the system scales from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.\n\nLedger Integrity Reconciliation: Be responsible for keeping independent ledgers aligned at all times despite asynchronous event processing. You will build the automated healthcheck and reconciliation systems that catch discrepancies the moment they appear, because none exist yet.\n\nRequirements\nYour Profile\n\nBuilds From Zero: You’d rather design the first version of a system than optimize someone else’s. You’re comfortable making the call when there’s no precedent to point to.\n\nObsessive About Correctness: You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis. Retries don’t erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives — the database.\n\nAssumes the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors change APIs without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway.\n\nCraves Ownership: You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving. You’re not looking to contribute to a system — you want to have engineered it.\n\nAble to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)\n\nExperience with Lithic , Column , LoanPro , Stripe Issuing , or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus\n\nBenefits\nCommitment, Compensation & Benefits\nThis will be a big commitment, and we’re aiming high. It needs to be something you are energised about taking on, or this isn’t the team for you.\n\nCompetitive Salary: $125,000 – $175,000 per year, commensurate with experience.\n\nGenerous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.\n\nTop-Tier Backing: We’ve raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels.\n\nRelocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA, or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to visit customers. We’re an in-person company and are in the office together.\n\nComprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.\n\nUnmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year).\n\n#J-18808-Ljbffr","datePosted":"2026-07-19T03:14:29.214Z","dateModified":"2026-07-19T03:14:29.214Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Eql Tech","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Millbrae","addressRegion":"CA","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"17bf778d90d54d8863aaa857"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/17bf778d90d54d8863aaa857"}}