Forward Deployed Engineer

**The Better Money Company** Forward Deployed Engineer; ~$200K+ base + equity (6-year vest); New York City (On-site)

**About Company** The Better Money Company (TBMC) is building a stablecoin clearinghouse — the infrastructure layer that lets stablecoins move like money rather than a trading asset. The clearinghouse gives fintechs, neobanks, banks, and payments companies 1:1 at-par swaps across chains and issuers, with guaranteed settlement times, fixed fees, and a compliant source of funds. They already support 8 of the top 10 issuance platforms and move real money for customers today.

Backed by $10M from a16z Crypto, plus BoxGroup, Sunflower Capital, and leading fintech angels. Design partners include Ramp and Modern Treasury. Founded by Sam Broner (ex-a16z investor covering stablecoins, ex-Boston Fed, ex-Microsoft engineer), with early team from Visa crypto treasury ops and a16z.

A small, deliberately tight NYC team — they shipped money movement within six months of starting and optimize for autonomy, ownership, and pace over headcount.

**About the Role** The FDE lives at the boundary between TBMC and its customers — payments companies and FIs, often on aging, fragmented infrastructure. They come in earlier than a typical FDE: owning the full integration lifecycle, helping define the product surface area built with partners, and translating customer needs into roadmap input. This is an engineer willing to do sales — technical sales alone isn't enough.

**Responsibilities** - Own the full integration lifecycle with customers/partners — scoping, technical design, implementation, testing, go-live. - Be the connective tissue between customers and product; triage and scope needs into actionable roadmap input. - Design and build shared tooling, SDKs, and documentation that make integrating fast and painless. - Debug production issues across system boundaries — first responder when something breaks between TBMC and a partner. - Talk to users and build product hands-on, not just advise.

**Required Skills** A. 3+ years building and shipping integrations with payment systems, financial infrastructure, and/or banking partners. B. Has been on the other end of the API — knows what good and bad integration experiences feel like. C. Excellent communication — translates between engineering-speak and customer-speak without losing fidelity. D. Enough payments fluency to move fast through complex flows of funds.

**Bonus Skills** - Stablecoin / blockchain experience (preferred, not required). - Prior forward-deployed / solutions-engineering experience.

**Logistical Info** - Location: NYC, on-site 5 days/week. Customer-facing, so expect partner travel/on-site. Remote/WFH-first candidates aren't a fit. - Compensation: ~$200K+ base + equity on a 6-year vest (outsized equity for early hires). - Number of openings: Ongoing — part of 2–3 engineering hires this month across Payments / Platform / FDE. - **Other:** Medical/dental/vision, unlimited PTO, periodic off-sites.

**Ideal Background** - Recruiter priority (Sept call): Alvaro said backend and platform/distributed-systems profiles move fastest right now, with security engineering also in scope. FDE is still valued, but weight backend/platform submissions first if you have to choose. - Strongest signal — FDE / solutions / integration engineers from fintech or payments infra (Stripe, Plaid, Modern Treasury, Brex, Ramp, Adyen, Marqeta). - Also strong — product-minded engineers from fintech startups who've owned customer integrations end to end. - The bar is platform-capable. Alvaro: "I wouldn't say your traditional solutions engineer is going to do the trick. If they're not someone that is technically savvy enough to actually build the platform, they're not going to be technically savvy enough to build the custom solutions in the way that our customers need it." The FDE they just hired is a backend engineer working on the core platform who contributes on banking integrations. That is the shape. - Polished enough to sit across from banking counterparties. Alvaro: "someone who's polished enough to interact with banking partners or banking points of contact. It's not your typical crypto degen software engineer on that one." - Logistics: relocation, exact equity range, and visa sponsorship are all TBC with the client — confirm before sharing with candidates. - How Alvaro reads a resume, in his words: - "Enhancing usually means someone else built it." - "Solely owning the full development lifecycle" is not enough by itself. Was it a feature they owned end to end, or an actual platform started from scratch? The bullet has to say which. - Data analytics, visualization, reporting, P&L, ETL, migration and normalization bullets read as a reporting engineer, not someone who builds systems that move money. The internal benchmark he names is Connor and Elaine: "built the full distributed system, touched the database, on the blockchain side indexers, and understands all of those different components that operate with it." - Alvaro's own description of what reliably works: CS degree from a good school, worked at early-stage startups, and promoted within a job rather than moving between jobs. Then one of two specialisms: payment rails, or AI/LLM. - AI/LLM engineers are in scope on all three roles with no payments background at all. Alvaro: "we're doing a lot of agentic build work, and I've seen the team gravitate towards a few profiles that are not payments-related at all, but they're really good engineers at understanding how to help the agents do the software development or creating loops and graphs... that'll allow more AI-enabled building, or at least more reliable AI-enabled building." He called this "the other candidate that I don't think you guys are targeting yet." Per his 8/21 Slack note: platform and/or backend core skills with a solid grasp on building alongside agents are the top priority. - Two paths that work for this seat per Alvaro: (1) built payment systems end-to-end, 0→1 then 1→10, or (2) real product-growth experience (0→1→10) with meaningful payments/banking-integration exposure, even without having owned a full payment system themselves. - Sam's framing (his words, via Alvaro): 'we're not really even hiring specialists... a lot of them are deep in their own space, but can contribute or work on both.' End-to-end ownership across a broad surface beats narrow specialization here. - Strong generalist backend candidates shouldn't be held back for not mapping cleanly to one of the three titles. Alvaro said generalist submissions often get captured and pivoted onto whichever of the three roles fits once the team sees them.

**Green Flags** - Genuinely strong engineer who's also energized by customer-facing work. - High urgency, ownership, and homework on TBMC. - Comfortable owning ambiguity across system boundaries. - Demonstrated track record of operating autonomously from day one; hits the ground running without heavy ramp-up support.

**Red Flags** - Solutions-engineer background without platform-building depth. - Can't go deep on flows of funds; intimidated by complex integrations. - Remote-first as a non-negotiable; multiple very short stints. - Otherwise strong candidate who still reads as needing significant ramp-up or hand-holding before operating independently. (Real example: a candidate the team liked lost out purely on this, not on skill.)

**Interview Process** 1. Screen with the team (~20 min). 2. Take-home. 3. Work trial. 4. Technical + customer-scenario round(s). 5. Final with Sam (founder). (Observed stages per Slack Jul 27: take-home + work trial are real steps; original doc listed only 3 steps.)