Software Engineer II, Marketplace Optimzation

The Team

Upstart’s Marketplace Optimization team is part of Capital Marketplace Engineering and is responsible for optimizing Upstart’s two-sided capital marketplace. Across Matching & Offer Selection and Monetization, the team builds the real-time decisioning systems, experimentation capabilities, and marketplace services that help match borrowers with sources of capital while improving marketplace efficiency, investor utilization, and business outcomes.

As a Software Engineer II, you will help design and build systems that enable faster experimentation, more sophisticated marketplace decisioning, and new monetization capabilities. You’ll work on business-critical systems where engineering decisions can directly influence revenue, profitability, capital utilization, borrower experience, and the scalability of Upstart’s marketplace.

How you’ll make an impact

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend systems that power real-time marketplace decisioning, matching, offer selection, and monetization.
• Build flexible platform capabilities that enable experimentation with allocation strategies, marketplace economics, and new monetization approaches while maintaining reliability and scalability.
• Develop reliable, observable services that balance availability, latency, correctness, and operational simplicity across complex distributed systems.
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Pricing Engineering, Data Science, Capital Markets, and Lending Partnerships to translate marketplace needs into effective technical solutions.
• Make architectural decisions that simplify systems, reduce coupling across marketplace and adjacent platforms, and create reusable capabilities that support future marketplace innovation.
• Use Generative AI tools thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and learning while maintaining ownership of technical decisions, security, code quality, and correctness.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) and 2 years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend or distributed systems in production.
• Experience developing production services using one or more modern backend programming languages.
• Experience building and operating business-critical systems with demonstrated use of testing, monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Experience designing production systems where reliability, availability, observability, and correctness are critical.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with marketplaces, financial systems, recommendation or matching engines, optimization systems, or experimentation platforms.
• Knowledge of low-latency, high-throughput distributed system design and architecture.
• Experience partnering with machine learning or data science teams to integrate models or data-driven decisioning into production systems.
• Experience with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, or Kotlin.
• Ability to navigate ambiguous technical and business problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and collaborate across engineering, product, and business teams.

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote from USA or Canada (except Quebec).

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

#LI-REMOTE

#LI-Associate --> use for L3, L4

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote 

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

#LI-REMOTE

#LI-Associate --> use for L3, L4