About the role
🚀 Staff Engineer, Thera (NYC, in-person)
Thera is building the financial OS for modern SMBs. Payroll, payments, treasury, spend, accounting, and docs in one system that actually works end-to-end.
We're looking for a hands-on Staff Engineer to own the technical foundation in our highest-leverage areas and help us scale from "great product" to category-defining company.
This is not a sit-back-and-manage role. You'll be in the code, in the architecture, and in the room making high-stakes decisions daily.
📍 NYC, 5 days/week
Why this role exists
We have:
- a product customers use
- real workflows running through it
- increasing complexity across payments, accounting, and ops
We need someone who can turn that into a durable, scalable system.
What you'll own
- Architecture and technical direction across payroll, payments, and new products
- Engineering execution on the hardest problems in the stack
- Helping hire and tech-lead a small, high-quality team (starting ~5 engineers)
- Decisions on security, reliability, scalability, and compliance in your areas
- Tight partnership with product and ops to translate real workflows into systems
- Roadmaps, prioritization, and actually shipping
What you'll build
- Systems powering payroll and money movement
- Products across Spend, Docs, Cash, and Accounting
- Internal tooling that reduces manual work and errors
- Infrastructure that increases velocity without breaking things
Your first 90 days
30 days
- Get deep on the system, data flows, and constraints
- Identify the biggest risks (payments, data integrity, scaling)
- Ship a meaningful improvement on the spend product
60 days
- Start addressing the highest-leverage technical gaps
- Map out future builds across the roadmap
- Begin influencing how we hire and level engineers
90 days
- Set technical direction in your areas
- Improve engineering velocity and reliability
- Help build out our engineering in-person culture
About you
- You've built and scaled real systems
- You're still hands-on and like being close to the code
- Strong systems thinker
- You move fast and take ownership
- Comfortable operating in a regulated environment
- You've mentored or tech-led engineers before
Stack today: TypeScript + Java/Kotlin (flexible)
Not a fit if
- You want a pure management role
- You avoid ambiguity or messy real-world systems
- You're not willing to be in-person in NYC
Why Thera
- You shape the technical foundation in your areas
- You work directly with founders
- Your decisions immediately impact the company's trajectory
Backed by YC, 10X Founders, Zillionize, and Amino Capital.
More: https://www.getthera.com/principles