Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

ABOUT COLUMN

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity: We're a lean, experienced engineering team, and we're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer. You'll define what this role looks like at Column.

As an FDE, you'll work with customers to understand their problems in depth and help them build new products on Column's APIs. What you learn in the field will feed directly into how our engineering team improves the platform.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll write code, debug payment flows and design integrations, and you'll spend a lot of time on-site with customers. You'll get deep exposure to the full banking stack, from our APIs down to the Federal Reserve.

This role is based in our Presidio office in San Francisco, with frequent travel to customer sites in the US and abroad. You will report directly to William, the CEO.

Read more about Life @ Column and our hiring process here https://www.notion.so/Hiring-at-Column-b8d9b2628317491989d4713091b6bb68?pvs=21. 🚀

What you'll do:

- Work directly with our partner’s engineering teams to design, build and launch products with Column's state-of-the-art banking stack

- Act as the technical owner for strategic customers from onboarding to launch, unblocking them on architecture, ledgering, reconciliation and edge cases in money movement

- Write production-quality code, that speeds up integrations and grows into reusable product

- Turn patterns from the field into product and platform improvements, working closely with engineering to shape our APIs, docs and developer experience

- Advise customers on how to build safe, compliant and resilient financial products in a regulated environment

- Represent Column in conversations with customer executives and engineering leaders, and build trusted, long-term relationships

What we're looking for:

- Strong engineering fundamentals, ideally with experience in backend systems, APIs or infrastructure