Principal Software Engineer - Data Platform

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

⚡ Direct Talent Broker Referral

Why apply through CandidatesReach?

✔ Tailored Executive Endorsement Letter: Highlight your real strengths and verified background directly to hiring leads.

✔ Your Preferred Screening Terms: Choose between a 1-minute quick phone screen or scheduled email calendar.

✔ $500 Cash Hiring Bonus: Receive $500 direct cash reward after 30 days of active employment.

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.

Job Description

The Data Platform Team is part of the Data Organization and is responsible for designing and building modern scalable, secure and reliable data platforms and data pipelines. With the data platforms, we will be able to serve the product/customer data needs, improve operational efficiency and increase revenue.

What you’ll be doing

Building secure and scalable data platforms that support our product/customer needs and power data driven decision making.
Writing high quality and robustly tested code, mostly in Java and Python.
Understanding business/data needs and growth to build the right solutions.
Documenting your work to support our rapidly-scaling company.
Interfacing with internal business stakeholders and technology partners to support day to day operations and create new data products.

What we are looking for

12+ years experience building high volume and low latency data platform and data pipelines using distributed event technology, e.g. Pubsub, Kafka, Kinesis, etc., and data storage system, e.g. Spanner/Postg

🎯 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.

🔒 Free Candidate Preparation Access

Unlock Preparation Priorities & Alignment Hook

🤝 Talent Broker Referral · $500 Bonus Included

Apply for Principal Software Engineer - Data Platform

Setup your contact terms & referral note to get recommended directly to the hiring lead at Highnote.

⚡ Continue with Google (Instant Setup)

or with email

Already have an account? Sign in here