Principal Software Engineer

🏢 Highnote · 📍 San Francisco, California 💰 $190,000 - $240,000 / yr

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Position Summary & Responsibilities

About Highnote

Founded in 2020 by a team of leaders from Braintree, PayPal, and Lending Club, Highnote is an embedded finance company that sets the standard in modern card platform management. As an all-in-one card issuer processor and program management platform, we provide digital-first organizations with the flexibility to seamlessly issue and process payment cards, embed virtual and physical card payments, and integrate ledger and wallet functionalities—empowering businesses to drive growth and profitability.

We’ve raised $145M+ and have grown our team to 140+ employees. Headquartered in San Francisco, we’ve managed to build one of the most advanced payments teams in the industry, with team members in 25+ US states.

Operating through our core values of customer obsession, executional excellence, intentional inclusion, we’re helping businesses grow for the future by creating the payment products demanded by tomorrow, with the ability to solve for use cases that don’t exist yet.

We are fast-moving, hands-on, and strongly believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. We believe we’re unlocking incredible opportunities that can change the future of payments, as long as we have the right people to make it happen.

What you’ll be doing

Building secure and compliant platform products that solve customer needs
Writing high quality and robustly tested code, mostly in Java
Understanding customer problems to build the right solutions
Documenting your work to support our rapidly-scaling company
Interfacing with a variety of the company’s domains to strengthen our platform

What we are looking for

12+ years experience building production software systems
A history of writing scalable, performant and maintainable code. We strongly believe languages can be learned and care more about your engineering skill over frameworks
Excitement about shipping customer centric software
Experience with Java >= 11, JPA ORM mapping, Crafting SQLs, unit and integration testing
Proficiency using AI-powered development tools (e.g., Claude Code) across the full software development lifecycle - including design, prototyping, development, testing, and iteration. A demonstrated passion for AI-driven development, a commitment to continuously advancing AI skills, and a

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Highnote Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Rigorous evaluation of architectural precision, security mindset, and adherence to modern fintech compliance standards.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Hand-waving security considerations or compliance requirements as 'post-launch problems'
2. Inability to trace a transaction lifecycle from frontend request to core banking ledger
3. Relying on monolithic architectures without understanding distributed system trade-offs

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I build resilient, developer-first financial infrastructure that scales securely without compromising speed to market.

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