Principal Software Engineer, Pricing Platform

The Team:

Upstart's Core Pricing team drives key initiatives that directly influence our revenue streams, unit economics, and product strategy. The team builds and evolves the common systems used to translate underwriting insights into accurate risk and profitability decisions for every loan we originate, while enabling a seamless borrower experience across products.

As a Principal Software Engineer on Core Pricing, you will provide technical leadership that spans engineering, machine learning, and product organizations — not just the Pricing team. You will shape the long-term architecture, strategy, and operating model for pricing systems that serve multiple product lines and stakeholders across the company. Working in close partnership with engineering, ML, product, and business leaders across Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, and adjacent platforms, you will lead the development of scalable, low-latency, highly reliable services that convert ML underwriting outputs into pricing decisions, and you will help define the future of Upstart's pricing platform as the company expands into new products, markets, and capabilities.

Our stack spans Python (Django, FastAPI, Celery), Kotlin/Spring Boot, gRPC/Protobuf, Temporal for workflow orchestration, AWS (S3, RDS/Postgres, ElastiCache), Kubernetes/Helm, and Datadog for observability.

How you'll make an impact

• Define the cross-company technical vision and roadmap for Upstart's pricing platform, ensuring alignment across Pricing, Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, ML, and Product organizations.
• Lead the architectural evolution from tightly coupled, sequential workflows toward modular, reusable platform capabilities across loan products.
• Design and improve Tier 0/Tier 1 services where latency, throughput, availability, and financial correctness are all critical.
• Partner closely with machine-learning scientists and engineers to create reliable, scalable boundaries between models and production pricing systems.
• Balance the sometimes-competing needs of engineering, machine learning, and product teams across organizations, making pragmatic trade-offs that serve Upstart's broader technical and business strategy.
• Clarify service, API, configuration, and ownership boundaries across Pricing, Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, and adjacent platform teams.
• Evaluate runtime and language choices pragmatically, including where Python, Kotlin, Rust or Go best serve long-term system needs.
• Reduce operational burden through better testing, observability, failure isolation, incident learning, and architecture that limits blast radius.
• Lead company-wide technical discussions, surface trade-offs clearly, and build alignment across Engineering, ML, Product, Data, Security, Compliance, and business partners.
• Stay close to implementation through design reviews, prototypes, and critical code while mentoring senior technical leaders and making the people around you more successful.
• Prioritize technical-debt and platform investments based on business value, risk reduction, and long-term return rather than technical elegance alone.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience - plus 8 or more years of software engineering experience.
• A track record of setting architecture and technical direction for large, complex distributed systems used across multiple teams or products.
• Deep backend engineering experience and production proficiency in at least one of Python, Kotlin, or Java; willingness and ability to work effectively in a predominantly Python environment.
• Experience designing or operating Tier 0/Tier 1 services with demanding latency, throughput, availability, and correctness requirements.
• Strong understanding of APIs, service-oriented or modular architectures, containerization, cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS), and maintainable software design.
• Hands-on technical judgment: you can move from strategy and architecture into concrete designs, prototypes, debugging, and critical implementation decisions.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex systems, constraints, and trade-offs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-organization technical decisions — balancing the needs of engineering, machine learning, and product teams — and influencing without direct authority.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and expanding the effectiveness and scope of other technical leaders.
• Strong product and business judgment, including the ability to balance delivery, reliability, technical debt, risk, and long-term investment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building calculation-heavy, real-time decisioning, pricing, marketplace, risk, fraud, payments, trading, auction, or advertising systems.
• Experience partnering with machine-learning teams or productionizing models at scale, including clear boundaries between modeling workflows and production services.
• Experience modernizing a mature or tightly coupled platform through staged migration while continuing to deliver customer and business value.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, microservices, event-driven systems, and production observability.
• Additional production experience with Rust or another performance-oriented language.
• Background or applied exposure in statistics, mathematics, economics, econometrics, financial systems, or other quantitative domains.
• Experience in a rapidly scaling or changing organization where architecture had to evolve alongside the business.

Position location 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.

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