Staff Engineer – Trust & Safety

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +7 more states.

📋 Description

• Develop the fraud platform by designing and implementing systems for fraud detection, risk decision-making, rule engines, scoring pipelines, event-driven risk signals, and backtesting infrastructure.

• Create tools for operators by building investigation and review systems that enable our Trust & Safety operations team to efficiently triage, investigate, and resolve cases. You prioritize both internal user experience and external outcomes.

• Influence future developments by collaborating closely with your manager, product, operations, and leadership stakeholders to identify vulnerabilities, propose solutions, and help set priorities for the roadmap. Your expertise in the domain is valuable — we want your insights on our next steps.

• Adopt an adversarial mindset by gaining a thorough understanding of various fraud vectors in the fundraising and payments sector, such as stolen cards, synthetic identities, friendly fraud, and campaign abuse, to help us build adaptive systems as threats evolve.

• Enhance payment integrity by collaborating across our payment systems to fortify the transaction lifecycle against misuse. You don't need to be a payments expert from day one.

• Foster team growth by mentoring engineers on your team in Trust & Safety domain expertise. Share your knowledge, collaborate on challenging problems, and help elevate the team's approach to adversarial challenges.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of software engineering experience, particularly in adversarial domains such as fraud, trust & safety, risk, or abuse prevention.

• Proven experience in building fraud detection or risk decision-making systems, including rule engines, scoring systems, policy frameworks, or investigation platforms. You have hands-on experience in creating these systems.

• Strong foundation in backend engineering, with the ability to design scalable, event-driven systems and evaluate distributed architecture trade-offs. You have resolved production issues across multiple stack layers.

• Ability to influence collaboratively, having driven technical initiatives across various teams and stakeholders. You are adept at building consensus and navigating ambiguity.

• Excellent judgment and prioritization skills, capable of dissecting vague issues such as "our dispute rate is climbing" and working with your team to formulate a clear action plan with defined next steps.

• Nice to Have: Familiarity with PHP/Laravel or similar MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, etc. While Laravel experience is advantageous, strong skills in any comparable framework are transferable.

• Experience leading projects or small teams in a senior IC role (e.g., technical lead/staff-level leadership), including setting direction, removing obstacles, and mentoring others.

• Background in React/TypeScript for frontend development.

• Knowledge of Stripe's APIs, payments, disputes, Radar, or similar payment processor integrations.

• Experience creating tools for operations or support teams, such as internal tooling, case management, or review queues.

• Background in fundraising, nonprofit tech, or marketplace platforms dealing with Trust & Safety challenges related to campaign legitimacy, donor protection, or platform abuse.

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (CDC, Kafka, event sourcing) for real-time risk signal processing.

• Experience working in AWS (EKS/Kubernetes, RDS, etc.).

🏝️ Benefits

• Remote Work: Enjoy the flexibility of working remotely from one of our 10 hubs (Austin, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Nashville).

• Health Insurance: We provide Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance fully covered for employees, along with HSA and FSA accounts.

• Dependent Care Coverage: Coverage for dependents is available, with 50% of Medical, Dental, and Vision premiums covered for all eligible dependents.

• Mental Health: Our health insurance plans include access to a TalkSpace membership.

• 401k: We offer a 3% 401k match for all eligible employees.

• Vacation and Holidays: Our Flexible PTO policy includes uncapped vacation days and company-recognized holidays.

• Wellness Week: We prioritize team rest and recharge by closing for one week each summer.

• Parental Leave: We provide 12 weeks of paid leave for all parents and comprehensive leave planning management through Aidora.

• Family Care Support: Access a company-paid UrbanSitter membership and care credits for trusted, background-checked caregivers for childcare, senior care, pet care, and household support.

• Home Office Stipend: Upgrade your home office with company-sponsored expenses for high-quality laptops, monitors, and modern technology.

• Coworking Stipend: Receive a monthly stipend to work from coworking spaces or cafés for connection and community when needed.

• Charitable Giving: Employees are encouraged to donate up to $50/month to any verified nonprofit they wish to support on Givebutter.

• Professional Development: We offer reimbursement opportunities for learning and development.

• Love What You Do: Join a mission-driven company dedicated to serving the charitable sector and feel good about the work you do and the company you represent.