Senior Forward-Deployed Engineer

Role Summary

Reliance Financial is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer to help turn its operational underwriting and servicing infrastructure into reliable systems used every day by financial services teams. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, implementation, data, and customer operations.

You will work directly with our stakeholders and operating teams to deploy and operationalize technology that supports underwriting, servicing, portfolio monitoring, risk identification, performance analysis, and collections activity. You will configure workflows, investigate production issues, improve data quality, and convert operational feedback into durable product and infrastructure improvements. You will be expected to move from business problem to working solution quickly while maintaining the engineering discipline required for systems that influence financial outcomes.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who is comfortable working in production, talking with non-technical users, reading unfamiliar code, writing scripts and integrations, and taking ownership of issues through resolution.

The engineer must be comfortable tracing a business issue across application code, database state, API boundaries, asynchronous workflows, secrets, deployment configuration, Agentic AI, and user-facing behavior.

Core Responsibilities

Deployment and Implementation

• Deploy and configure our operational infrastructure for underwriting, servicing, portfolio, and other financial workflows.

• Coordinate environments, integrations, permissions, configuration, data mappings, and operational readiness for new deployments.

• Support releases from development through quality assurance, stakeholder approval, production readiness, and post-release monitoring.

• Create repeatable implementation procedures so deployments become faster, safer, and less dependent on individual team members.

Engineering and Technical Problem Solving

• Diagnose issues across the application, APIs, databases, integrations, and deployment infrastructure.

• Read and modify production code when necessary to resolve implementation blockers or improve product behavior.

• Build lightweight tools, scripts, data transformations, and internal utilities that reduce manual work for funding/lending teams.

• Work with engineers to convert one-off fixes into maintainable platform capabilities.

• Improve observability, documentation, error handling, and operational runbooks.

• Trace failures across synchronous request paths and asynchronous workflows, including webhooks, scheduled jobs, document extraction, data synchronization, and notification pipelines.

• Validate API contracts, database schemas, authentication boundaries, row-level security policies, idempotency, retry behavior, and failure recovery before promoting changes.

• Support production releases across multiple services, including versioned deployments,

health checks, environment configuration, secret injection, traffic promotion, and rollback or remediation plans.

MCA/Lending Operations and User Partnership

• Work directly with underwriters, portfolio managers, collections teams, and executives to understand how the systems are used in practice.

• Translate operational problems into clear technical requirements and implementation plans.

• Identify where system behavior, data quality, or workflow design could create credit, revenue, compliance, or customer-service risk.

• Train users and provide practical guidance during rollout and adoption.

• Escalate product gaps and recurring issues with evidence, business impact, and a recommended path forward.

Data and Reliability

• Validate that merchant, deal, payment, portfolio, and collections data is complete, accurate, timely, and mapped correctly.

• Investigate discrepancies between source systems and our reporting or decision workflows.

• Establish deployment checklists and post-deployment validation for business-critical workflows.

• Protect sensitive financial and merchant information by following access-control, security, and data-handling practices.

Required Qualifications

• At least five years of professional experience deploying production-quality code in high-risk environments. The candidate must have a demonstrated record of shipping, operating, and supporting software used in real business workflows.

• Demonstrated experience deploying, integrating, or operating software used by business teams.

• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language and the ability to work productively in an existing codebase.

• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL.

• Experience diagnosing API, data, authentication, environment, and deployment problems.

• Experience with TypeScript/Node.js or a comparable production web stack, REST APIs, relational data models, and cloud-hosted services.

• Experience operating distributed workflows that use webhooks, background jobs, queues or scheduled execution, retries, and third-party API integrations.

• Practical understanding of observability, structured logging, error tracking, health checks, release validation, and incident response.

• Ability to communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical business users.

• Strong ownership, prioritization, and follow-through in an environment with changing requirements.

• Willingness and ability to work onsite in Toms River three days per week.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with financial services, lending, merchant cash advance, payments, banking, or collections operations.

• Experience with underwriting, loan-origination, portfolio-management, or servicing systems.

• Experience with cloud deployment, CI/CD, application monitoring, and production incident response.

• Experience integrating document extraction, email, spreadsheet, payment, financial-data, or other external operational systems through APIs and webhooks.

• Experience implementing systems where data accuracy and workflow reliability affect financial decisions.

• Experience working in a forward-deployed, solutions, customer-engineering, or startup environment.

Success Measures

During the first six months, success will be measured by the engineer’s ability to:

• Complete deployments with fewer manual steps, avoidable defects, and unresolved handoffs.

• Establish reliable implementation and post-release validation procedures for the core operational platform.

• Reduce the time required to diagnose and resolve deployment and production issues.

• Improve the quality and completeness of data supporting underwriting, servicing, portfolio performance, risk management, and collections workflows.

• Earn adoption and trust from funding/lending users by resolving real operating problems, not merely delivering technical changes.

• Convert recurring implementation issues into documented, repeatable product or infrastructure improvements.

• Demonstrate that multi-service releases have validated health checks, observable failure modes, controlled configuration, and a documented recovery path.

Reporting and Collaboration

The Forward-Deployed Engineer will work closely with the CTO function, the engineering team, the Technical Product Manager, funding/lending operations, and company leadership. The role requires direct communication with stakeholders and a willingness to surface risks early, especially where a technical issue could affect deal decisions, portfolio visibility, collections execution, or revenue.

Location

• Location: Toms River, New Jersey

• Onsite expectation: Three days per week

• Travel: Occasional travel may be required for customer, partner, or operating-team meetings

• Work environment: Close collaboration with engineering, funding/lending operations, and executive stakeholders