Who we are
About Backpack
Backpack is a payments infrastructure company building the first connected
banking and payments platform for the $1.8 Trillion Higher Education market.
Our core platform is used by Universities, connecting information and money flows to facilitate the most complex payment types that represent a growing share of total tuition - already totaling hundreds of billions in annual volume.
As education becomes more expensive, students and their families are increasingly looking to a broader array of funding sources, including 529 college savings plans, outside/private scholarships, third-party sponsors, and family contributions - we are bringing these online by building the first payments system for these payment types.
Some Quick-fire Facts About Us
- Raised $5M in venture funding from Walkabout Ventures and Mischief Ventures, as well as founders and executives from Plaid, SoFi, Brex, Chime, Square and many others.
- Have built the first connected banking platform in higher education with a team of six, already processing tens of millions in payment volume
- Partnered directly with some of the country’s largest universities, including The University of Alabama and Miami University.
- Our mighty team of six is on a mission to build an entirely new payments system for Higher Ed which significantly reduces the ~$50BN in fees paid by student families every year, improving accessibility and affordability of education across the country.
About The Team
Our goal is to make external payments into universities
shockingly simple and worry-free for students, families, universities, and funding organizations alike. Behind the scenes, this requires building
sophisticated payment operations systems that handle complex money movement, automated reconciliation, and real-time visibility — all tailored to the specific needs of
university bursars, financial aid teams, and external funders.
Our founding team has been brought together to ensure we have the best blend of experience to achieve this; from deep payments and technical expertise, to go-to-market and operations. We are a group of past operators and executives that have worked at technology companies like Uber and Google, FinTech companies like SoFi and Atlas, EdTech companies like Blackbaud and traditional financial services companies like UBS, KPMG and Accenture.
The Role
We’re looking for a talented front-end engineer to help shape the future of our consumer-facing application for students and their families and our growing university payment operations platform. We’re a small and mighty team of 6, so you’ll have the opportunity to participate in product/feature discussions, propose new ideas, rapidly prototype and experiment with innovative technologies, and contribute to our documentation practices.
Here’s a glance at what the first 30, 60, 90 days could look like:
In The First 30 Days, You’ll
- Familiarize yourself with our codebase, start contributing to our consumer application, and deploy to production within the first 2 weeks.
- Squash a few bugs, write some SQL queries, and help debug issues for internal tools or consumers.
- Participate in product and technical discussions to bring the end user/user experience insight and collaborate with other engineers on API endpoint design.
- Take ownership of the front-end portion of a small to medium project. This could look like working with product and other engineers to scope the work, writing the tickets/project milestones, building the feature, and hosting a user acceptance testing session.
In The First 60 Days, You’ll
- Lead a medium to large project end to end including everything from above as well as scoping the features, identifying areas that require back-end support or have back-end dependencies, managing the project and timeline, and writing a technical design doc and/or a product feature doc.
- Contribute to an existing engineering doc or write a new doc - we write all kinds of docs from technical initiatives we want to pursue or a how-to’s like how to write a bug ticket to get a high five from a front-end engineer.
- Enter our engineering sprint facilitator rotation which includes hosting meetings such as our biweekly engineering retro.
- Plan and lead a project to scale front-end infrastructure and/or front-end tooling and…maybe you’ll have even participated in a CARE (Customer and Reliability Emphasis) month project.
In The First 90 Days, You’ll
- Lead large project that could encompass multiple phases and engineers and work closely with product and other stakeholders from when an idea starts to conceptualize to releasing the feature to our users.
- Launched one or more front-end infrastructure initiatives - such as updates to our CI/CD pipeline, creating linter helpers, or introduced a new testing framework for end-to-end tests.
What We’re Looking For
You’ll Do Well In This Role If
- You thrive in ambiguity and can collaborate with the entire team to iterate through problems and deliver features that enhance our customer’s experiences.
- You are dedicated to your own growth and have the drive to continuously learn.
- You are an energy creator and love bringing new ideas to the table.
- You’re a self-starter that takes pride in delivering high quality work and are passionate about the end user’s experience.
- You are comfortable talking to and working with customers of any kind - student families, university business offices, merchants - and can put yourself in their shoes.
Your Experience
We recognize not everyone will meet all of the criteria. If you meet most of the criteria below and you’re excited about the opportunity and willing to learn, we’d love to hear from you.
- 5+ years of professional (non-internship) experience in front-end development and web application development
- 4+ years of production level experience with JavaScript/Typescript
- Experience/Proficient with modern JS frameworks such as React or Vue.js. (We use React and experience with React is preferred but not required)
- Strong HTML and CSS fundamentals (experience with TailwindCSS is a plus!)
- Experience with Postgres or other relational databases and comfortable writing SQL queries
- Experience working with REST, GraphQL APIs, etc and API design
- Experience writing tests with front-end testing frameworks like Vitest, Jest, or Playwright
- Experience working with version control systems such as Git
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a remote team via tools like Slack, Notion, and Linear
- Strong problem-solving skills with attention to detail
Nice to Have’s
- Experience with Retool
- Knowledge of accessibility best practices and/or building accessibility compliant (a11y) web applications
- Experience with Node.JS, Next.js, and server side rendering (SSR)
- Experience with scaling front-end infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and front-end tooling like Vite
- Experience designing and/or wireframing in tools like Figma
- Comfortable using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform
- Experience working in Fintech, the financial services industry, or at early/pre-seed start up
Our tech stack
- Front-end: Typescript/JavaScript, React, Zustand, CSS, TailwindCSS, Vitest, and Vite
- Back-end: NodeJS, Postgres, Terraform, AWS
Pay and benefits
Salary
The salary range for this role is $100,000 - $150,000
Equity
Competitive Equity Package
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision health care plans
- Health care FSA/HSA plans
- 401K
- Commuter benefits
- PTO & 10+ Public Holidays
- Backpack Recharges - dedicated team time off to recharge
Location
New York City, NY or Austin, TX (Hybrid - In-office 3-5 days), or Remote.
Interview Process
We know the interview processes can be a long and overwhelming. Here is what you can expect:
- Initial interview with one of our co-founders or the hiring manager (30 - 45 mins)
- Second interview with the hiring manager or our other co-founder (30 - 45 mins)
- A coding assesment - JavaScript/Typescript + SQL take home or virtual) (60 mins)
- Virtual Onsite that includes:
- Technical interviews (coding and non-coding)
- Meeting the rest of Backpack team
- Reference calls (we’ll ask for 2 references with at least one being a direct manager)
Accommodations
We are committed to providing an accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations during any point in the interview process, please let us know and we’ll work with you to better accommodate your needs.
We look forward to hearing from you!
We cannot wait to hear from passionate, driven and talented people that are excited about our mission. We are building a first of its kind fintech company to completely revolutionize an entire asset class and, eventually, how all Americans pay for their education. We acknowledge that this is a big ask list so even if there are a couple of missing pieces, we strongly urge you to still apply.
