Staff Software Engineer

About the role

ABOUT MEADOW

Meadow is the modern payments platform for higher education that simplifies the entire student financial experience. We're transforming the $600 Billion higher education payments industry in the United States — building for universities what Shopify built for retail businesses, and bringing the entire student financial experience online.

The need for a platform like Meadow has never been greater. If you're passionate about our mission to empower students financially and strengthen economic mobility through higher education — and you're excited to join a highly ambitious, talented team — we'd love to hear from you.

ABOUT THE ROLE

OVERVIEW

Meadow is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale our student financial engagement platform, Meadow Pay. As we continue expanding to universities nationwide, this role will be critical in delivering reliable, scalable product experiences for our institutional partners and their students.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate core systems across our backend and frontend stack, partnering closely with Product, CX, and Integrations to deliver high-quality software. This role requires strong technical judgment, a high bar for quality, and a desire to take ownership of meaningful product areas from concept through production.

AI tooling (e.g. Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc.) is a core part of how our team works and ships code every day. We're looking for a Software Engineer who is excited to use AI as a core part of their workflow. The ideal candidate should have experience building products in a way that AI tooling can efficiently understand context and collaborate with the user.

This is a full-time position reporting to Mike https://www.linkedin.com/in/mferraco/, Meadow's Engineering Manager.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- You'll lead end-to-end development of product features from design through deployment and ongoing support.

- You'll architect and build scalable backend services and APIs (TypeScript/Node.js).

- You'll contribute to frontend development using modern frameworks (React preferred).

- You'll design systems with reliability, observability, and maintainability in mind.

- You'll collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, CX, and Integrations teams to deliver customer-facing functionality.

- You'll participate in code reviews and uphold high standards for code quality and system design.

- You'll improve engineering processes, tooling, and documentation to support scale.

- You'll help shape technical decisions and engineering culture as we grow.

ABOUT YOU

WHAT YOU BRING

- 10+ Years of Experience in Product Engineering - You have experience building and operating production systems at scale.

- Ownership - Builder Mindset: You demonstrate High Agency x High Urgency. - You own problems end-to-end. - You make consequential decisions that impact outcomes. - Agency: You make significant decisions across projects and act on them without waiting for consensus. You are comfortable committing under uncertainty and getting others moving. - Decisions: You make high-stakes calls that hold up over time. You are the person others trust to be right for big technical decisions. - Operational Excellence: You drive sweeping improvements to stability/performance/scalability of business-critical systems and raise the operational bar for other engineers.