Software Engineer, Lifecycle
Backend engineer on the Lifecycle team building scalable services for SMS, email, push and real-time marketing automation. Partner with marketing, analytics and ML teams to deliver data-driven engagement at Upstart.
About the job
How you’ll make an impact
- Design and build scalable backend services that power our unified communications platform across SMS, email, push, and future channels.
- Develop systems for real-time, event-triggered messaging and self-serve marketing automation and experimentation capabilities.
- Translate large, complex datasets into high-leverage marketing capabilities through APIs, streaming pipelines, and reverse ETL workflows.
- Partner closely with product managers, lifecycle marketing, data insights, analytics, and data platform teams to define requirements and deliver impactful, data-driven solutions.
- Lead medium-sized projects independently—proactively identifying risks, managing ambiguity, and driving execution from design through launch.
- Strengthen our engineering culture by improving system reliability, accelerating iteration, and clearly communicating technical trade-offs to cross-functional stakeholders.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) + 3 years of experience
- Experience building and operating microservices and APIs in a cloud environment (preferably AWS).
- Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Kotlin, Java, Ruby, or Python.
- Demonstrated ability to independently execute on projects, navigate ambiguity, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional partners.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to work in a distributed team
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting Marketing, Growth, or GTM teams, particularly in environments involving CDPs, customer segmentation, or campaign orchestration.
- Experience with reverse ETL tools (e.g., Hightouch, Census), data pipeline tooling (e.g., Airbyte, Fivetran, Databricks), or marketing automation platforms (e.g., Iterable, Braze, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
- Familiarity with real-time event streaming systems and high-throughput messaging architectures.
- Experience integrating with third-party APIs and building systems that ingest, transform, and expose large volumes of data.
- Track record of leading medium-to-large projects and contributing to system design decisions with long-term platform impact.
Skills
AWS, Kotlin, Java, Ruby, Python, Microservices, APIs, Reverse Etl, Streaming Pipelines, Databricks
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