Location: New York City preferred. Remote available, but must travel 1–2 weeks per quarter to NYC
Compensation: $160K–$180K + equity, depending on experience
About us
1 in 3 Americans who qualify for government benefits never receive them—because the system is fragmented, manual, and nearly impossible to navigate. Over $500B flows through outdated, unconnected infrastructure every year.
Starlight is building the core infrastructure layer that connects financial institutions and fintechs directly to government benefits. We help underserved households access SNAP, LIHEAP, utility support, and more.
Starlight is a B2B2C company—we already partner with 15+ financial institutions, reach over 700K users, and have found over $15M for the households we serve (2025 wrapped). We are accelerating impact, partnerships, and products as we scale.
We are backed by Caffeinated Capital, Commerce Ventures, TruStage Ventures, Garuda Ventures, and industry-leading angels.
The role
This is a founding senior engineering role. You'll be one of the first engineers on a small team, building and owning major parts of the core stack and product experience:
- Eligibility and application infrastructure—the engine that tracks program eligibility and application state for hundreds of thousands of households, today powered by deterministic rules and benefits-calculator integrations, tomorrow by prediction models built on first and third-party data.
- Partner integrations—the pipes that connect financial institutions to us: secure data exchange, SSO, and versioned partner APIs. When a bank turns us on, hundreds of thousands of their customers get access overnight.
- AI-native agents that navigate complex benefits systems on behalf of households. This is early—you'd be helping us build this layer from scratch, not inheriting it.
- Communication systems—the messaging layer that guides households from "you may qualify" to money in hand: email, SMS, and in-app today, adapted to each partner's channels and brand.
- Experimentation—we want product decisions earned by evidence, not argument. You'd help build the culture and the infrastructure behind it: ship, measure, learn, repeat.
You won't inherit a finished roadmap; you'll help build it. Contribute to engineering culture, technical direction, and velocity standards from the ground up.
Our stack
- Backend: Ruby on Rails 8 (API-only) on PostgreSQL (Aurora), with Postgres-backed background jobs
- Frontend: TypeScript and Next.js / React 19—multiple apps (consumer, partner-facing, internal ops, other) in a shared monorepo
- Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Aurora, S3, SQS, Lambda), fully managed with Terraform
- Tooling: GitHub Actions CI that deploys to production on every merge; Datadog for observability; PostHog for analytics, feature flags, and experimentation