Full Stack Software Engineer - Payments

🏢 Substack · 📍 San Francisco (HQ) · 💼 hybrid · ⏰ FullTime

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Position Summary & Responsibilities

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who actually make and participate in that culture. Substack’s model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing. It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences.

About the Payments Team
Subscription payments are the heart of Substack’s product and business model. Everything we do is based on the idea that creators can and should be paid directly by their audience, instead of relying on attention capture and advertising. And we believe that creators themselves should own these payment relationships, without being tied to any platform, including ours.

We are a small team with outsized impact and ownership. We take on both the traditional payments engineering : integrating with payment processors, managing the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription revenue, and also the full stack feature development that drives those payments. This means a wide variety of projects, including building brand new payout systems, A/B testing the subscribe flow, and shipping features like gift subscriptions.

Responsibilities

Develop the core payment surfaces and backend systems on Substack.
Own your work and deliver high-quality solutions from product concept and proposal to implementation, experimentation, and measurement.
We work with TypeScript, especially Node/Express and React, and Postgres. It’s helpful if you know these technologies already; if not, we’ll be excited to help you learn.
We also work with payment processors, including Stripe. Again, experience here is beneficial but not required.

Requirements

3+ years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping web applications.

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Substack Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Evaluating intense creator-first empathy, deep autonomy, and an absolute aversion to corporate bureaucracy and ad-driven business models.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Recommending programmatic ads, paywalls with friction, or venture-backed growth hacking gimmicks
2. Sounding like a risk-averse enterprise middle-manager rather than a builder
3. Lacking personal consumption or deep understanding of contemporary independent newsletters

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I am obsessed with eliminating the middleman between creators and their audiences through dead-simple, writer-first software.

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