Member of Technical Staff (Backend)
We're building Percy, the AI agent that runs financial crime investigations 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 that take hours and are stitched together from legacy vendors. We believe AI will make most of these decisions within a few years, so we built Percy to handle them. Percy 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%+ and routinely catches fraud that human reviewers miss.
Percy is only possible because of the identity platform we've spent four years building underneath it. Because we own the entire identity flow, Percy resolves ambiguity at the source, running its own checks across our verification tools before a case ever reaches a human.
We're backed by QED, Index, Box Group, and Lerer Hippeau, and trusted by companies like Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. We 5x'd revenue last year and plan to do it again in 2026. The team is small, senior, and ships fast.
The Role
Footprint's backend spent four years on one product: identity verification. Bounded requests, keeping sensitive data safe, and auditable answers a bank can act on.
Percy made it two. A Percy-run investigation reasons across many data sources, runs its own verification checks against the platform, and writes a case narrative a regulator will eventually read. Every one of those capabilities lands as a backend service first, built by the same small team that keeps verification running.
The identity platform underneath was built for bounded request/response work, and agent-shaped workloads ask different questions of it. There's little precedent to copy, so the answers come from intuition and first principles.
You'd span both worlds: the platform banks and fintechs 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
You've designed, built, and operated backend systems under real load, and debugged 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