Founding Engineer (Senior/Staff/Principal)

TLDR;

• We’re building the first AI-native finance platform for lending
• Backed by leading Australian and international investors
• Working with Australian lenders
• Looking for full-stack engineers who like owning problems end to end
• Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a tightknit all-star early team

What you’ll build

• A modern SaaS platform with smart AI functionality, slick UX, and real automation that delivers on the AI promise
• Credit Decision Engines: systems that analyze loan applications with speed and accuracy, turning complex credit policies into executable code
• Financial Infrastructure: multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive financial data with reliability and security
• Document Processing Pipelines: intelligent extraction and structuring of data from unstructured documents using ML models
• Compliance Architecture: audit trails and reporting that regulated lenders can rely on

Who we want

We’re assembling a top-tier founding team and we’re looking for the brightest engineers with startup experience and a founder mindset. If you’re looking for a comfortable job with well-defined tasks, this isn’t it. If you want to move quickly and deliberately, own massive impact, and shape a world-class product from day one, let’s talk.

You need

Mindset & approach

• Startup experience and founder mentality - you’ve built things from scratch, owned projects end-to-end, and think beyond code to the bigger picture
• Speed and autonomy - thrive in a high-velocity environment where ideas become shipped features quickly
• Curiosity and boldness - comfortable stepping outside your comfort zone, learning new domains, and talking to customers directly

Essential experience

• 5+ years building production systems (fintech, payments, or other regulated industries ideal)
• Strong JVM expertise (Kotlin or Java) with deep Spring ecosystem knowledge, or deep experience working in other complex backend languages and can pick up language quickly
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed microservices architectures
• Database design with ACID/audit requirements and strong PostgreSQL knowledge
• Cloud-native development with containerisation and IaC (we use Google Cloud)
• Track record of building scalable, maintainable codebases for growing teams

Valuable experience

• Event-driven architecture (Kafka or similar)
• AI/ML integration (document processing, NLP, LLM-based automation)
• RAG pipelines, embeddings, vector DBs, full-text search
• Realtime collaboration features (Websockets, YJS, tRPC)
• Custom UI component libraries / design systems
• DevOps experience with GCP, GitHub Actions, Cloud Run
• Excellent taste in product and UI design – You have a strong sense of what makes a great user experience and care about the details.

How we work

• Ship end-to-end: You own the problem, not just a layer in the stack
• High autonomy: You’ll have the context and trust to make big decisions
• How we work: We move quickly and deliberately, with a small team, clear ownership, high standards, and controls that regulated lenders can rely on

Why join Slate

Impact

Your code will directly reduce loan processing times from weeks to minutes, helping Australians access credit when they need it.

Growth

As one of our first engineers, you’ll have significant influence on technical direction and company culture. We offer a $2,000 annual learning budget and encourage and support presenting at fintech meetups/conferences.

Culture

Small team, high autonomy, no bureaucracy. We ship end-to-end, value clarity and excellence, and build sustainable systems and sustainable careers.