The posting
Forward Deployed Engineer - Modernizing Public Services
Location: San Francisco, CA (In-Office)
Partnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup to appoint a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical bridge between a state-scale public benefit program and the software that runs it — translating how banks, card networks, and state agencies actually operate into a system that works.
About the Company & The Mission
EQL Tech is proud to represent a highly ambitious, well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds).
The $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life's work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.
The Team
You will be joining an in-person company, working together in the office.
- The Founders: The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together. One previously worked as a Quant at Goldman Sachs, and the other built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally, serving 1M customers/day at age 19.
- The Core Team: You will work alongside top talent, including a founding engineer who did AI research at MILA and at Elon Musk's SpaceX school, a Head of Risk from Mercury, Stripe, and Circle, a Payments Engineer from Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, and the former Deputy Director at Arizona's ESA department — who will be one of your closest collaborators when it comes to what state agencies actually need from this system.
The Role: Forward Deployed Engineer
No two states run their education funds the same way, and no banking partner's reporting requirements read exactly like the JD. As Forward Deployed Engineer, your job is to sit close to that reality — the state agencies, the banking partner, the auditors — and turn it into a system that's correct, auditable, and doesn't buckle when a state changes its reporting format with two weeks' notice. You will work directly alongside the co-founders and the former Arizona ESA Deputy Director to build that bridge.
As Forward Deployed Engineer, you will:
- Own the regulatory and banking-partner reporting surface: build the daily loan-tape and originations pipeline, audit trails, and reporting that state regulators and banking auditors actually rely on — and be the person who understands why they need it in that shape.
- Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports — and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast, including when a mismatch traces back to how a specific state processes a transaction.
- Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow, regardless of which state or bank it touches.
- Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements) as new states and partners come online.
- Payment Systems Architecture: Own and evolve a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs. Make architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments.
Requirements
Your Profile
- Comfortable Translating Ambiguity: You can take a half-formed requirement from a state agency or a banking partner and turn it into a concrete system design, without waiting for someone else to spec it first.
- Obsessive About Correctness: You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis. Retries don't erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives — the database.
- Assumes the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors and agencies change requirements without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway.
- Craves Ownership: You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving between families, banks, and state agencies — not one contributor among many.
- Able to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)
- Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing, or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus.
Benefits
Commitment, Compensation & Benefits
This will be a big commitment, and we're aiming high. It needs to be something you are energised about taking on, or this isn't the team for you.
- Competitive Salary: $125,000 – $175,000 per year, commensurate with experience.
- Generous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.
- Top-Tier Backing: We've raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels.
- Relocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA, or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to visit customers. We're an in-person company and are in the office together.
- Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.
- Unmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year).
