Payments Engineer

**The Better Money Company** Payments 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 clearinghouse lives or dies on correct, resilient money movement. The Payments Engineer designs and builds the fiat-and-stablecoin clearing system end to end — ledgering, reconciliation, and the integrations into banks, issuers, and custodians the rest of the product depends on. A deep payments seat for someone who has built payment infrastructure before and treats moving customer money as a serious responsibility.

**Responsibilities** - Design, build, and scale components of the money-movement / clearing system. - Build integrations with banks, stablecoin issuers, custodians, and partners — often across aging, fragmented APIs. - Own ledgering, reconciliation, and auditability so balances are always provably correct. - Build core product functionality that enables better stablecoin payments for customers. - Weigh in on broader architecture and bring insights the team doesn't yet have.

**Required Skills** A. 3+ years building deeply with payment systems, financial infrastructure, and/or banking integrations. B. Has taken the same system 0→1 and then 1→10. Both halves, not one. It does not have to be a payment system, but some of it needs to be in payments or banking integrations. C. Deep understanding of fiat payment rails (ACH, wires, RTP) plus ledgering, reconciliation, and auditing. D. Strong distributed-systems fundamentals — ships fast without sacrificing correctness or scale.

**Bonus Skills** - Stablecoin / blockchain familiarity (teachable here; not required). - Resilient integrations across legacy / fragmented financial APIs.

**Logistical Info** - Location: NYC, on-site 5 days/week. Not rigidly tracked, but candidates who lead with remote/WFH as a top requirement 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): backend and platform/distributed-systems profiles are what Alvaro says move fastest and are most useful right now; security engineering is also in scope. This role is squarely in that bucket. - Strongest signal — Bridge, PayPal, Stripe, Robinhood, Block/Square, Brex, Ramp, Modern Treasury, Plaid, Mercury, Adyen, Wise. Alvaro calls this "a very hard fit to bring across," so treat it as the ceiling profile, not the volume profile. - Big-bank, big-fintech and hedge-fund backgrounds are the most common failure mode here, not a strong signal. Those environments hand people a scoped piece and they never see the full application. Only send one when the resume shows an owned system, not an owned component. - Crypto/stablecoin experience is a plus, not a requirement. - Calibration: an exceptional systems engineer without direct payments experience may still be in scope (confirming with client). - 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. - 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** - Treats moving customer money as a serious responsibility — security and correctness mindset. - High urgency and ownership; ships something useful in week one and connects it to where the product goes next. - Did real homework on TBMC before the conversation. - Demonstrated track record of operating autonomously from day one; hits the ground running without heavy ramp-up support.

**Red Flags** - Lack of depth — knows how their last system worked but can't reason beyond it. - Lack of urgency / "plodding along" in a regulated-comfort zone. - Doesn't take money-movement responsibility seriously. - 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 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.)