Software Engineer

Software Engineer

Our client Elective is a Vancouver-based fintech that builds the lending infrastructure for the online education industry - flexible payment options at checkout for courses, coaching programmes, and digital learning communities, with Elective carrying the risk. The company is five years old, founder-led, and profitable.

Elective has supported over 100K+ customers, looking to improve themselves through education; all underwritten, funded and serviced through a platform we built from the ground up.

The engineering team is entering something significant: planning for growth and setting the foundation for the company’s next phase, leaning on five years of accumulated knowledge about what Elective actually is and what it needs to do next.

This is not a role for someone looking to join a rigid team and pick up a prescriptive workload. Three engineers are being hired into active foundation-setting - contributing to architectural decisions early, working across a complex product surface, and operating in a system where the consequences of errors are real. The right person has been somewhere like this before and found it energizing rather than overwhelming.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Contributing to architectural growth - helping set the foundations for Elective's next phase, and participating in planning how the system gets there
• Working across the full product surface: checkout, merchant portal, risk and underwriting engine, loan management system, APIs and services
• Building toward 99.8% certainty on critical business operations - thinking in failure cases and recovery paths, not just happy paths
• Bringing best practices to a codebase being rebuilt from the ground up, with a genuine invitation to do it better
• Owning your work from architecture to deployment in an eight-week cycle model built around focus, purpose, and real product accountability using the ShapeUp methodology from 37signals
• Building focused, functional interfaces over heavy UI

WHAT YOU BRING

• Four to seven years of full-stack experience, with a lean toward back-end and a product-centric mindset
• Experience building in a consequence-aware environment - fintech, health tech, insurance, or anywhere that errors have real impact on real people
• The instinct to ask what happens when this does not work before you ask what happens when it does
• Comfort operating with autonomy in a high-context, low-documentation environment - you ramp through doing, not through being taught
• Opinions about how things should be built, and the pragmatism to know when to hold them and when to adapt
• Previous experience making product decisions you couldn't walk back - you've owned the outcome, not just the output
• You invest in your tools - including LLMs - and have formed opinions through trial and error about how you work best
• You'll happily spar with your co-workers to reach a solution - and you understand the nuance between the correct outcome and the right outcome

THE STACK

• Node.js - Express and tRPC
• Vue.js and React
• Tailwind and Daisy UI
• Postgres
• Temporal
• Redis
• Digital Ocean (droplets, managed apps, buckets)
• GitLab
• NX

THE DETAILS

Compensation

$110,000 - $140,000 base, based on experience, plus performance bonus

Location

Vancouver, BC - Hybrid (minimum 3 days per week in office)

Reporting line

Co-Founder and Head of Engineering

This search is being conducted by BoldHouse Executive Search.