Staff Engineer
Thera is seeking a hands-on Staff Engineer to own the technical foundation and scale their financial OS for SMBs. This role involves architecture, engineering execution on complex problems, and tech-leading a small team.
About the job
What you'll own
- Architecture and technical direction across payroll, payments, and new products
- Engineering execution on the hardest problems in the stack
- Helping hire and tech-lead a small, high-quality team (starting ~5 engineers)
- Decisions on security, reliability, scalability, and compliance in your areas
- Tight partnership with product and ops to translate real workflows into systems
- Roadmaps, prioritization, and actually shipping
What you'll build
- Systems powering payroll and money movement
- Products across Spend, Docs, Cash, and Accounting
- Internal tooling that reduces manual work and errors
- Infrastructure that increases velocity without breaking things
Your first 90 days
30 days
- Get deep on the system, data flows, and constraints
- Identify the biggest risks (payments, data integrity, scaling)
- Ship a meaningful improvement on the spend product
60 days
- Start addressing the highest-leverage technical gaps
- Map out future builds across the roadmap
- Begin influencing how we hire and level engineers
90 days
- Set technical direction in your areas
- Improve engineering velocity and reliability
- Help build out our engineering in-person culture
About you
- You've built and scaled real systems
- You're still hands-on and like being close to the code
- Strong systems thinker
- You move fast and take ownership
- Comfortable operating in a regulated environment
- You've mentored or tech-led engineers before
- Stack today: TypeScript + Java/Kotlin (flexible)
Why Thera
- You shape the technical foundation in your areas
- You work directly with founders
- Your decisions immediately impact the company's trajectory
- Backed by YC, 10X Founders, Zillionize, and Amino Capital.
Skills
TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, System Design, Architecture
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