Platform Engineer

**The Better Money Company** Platform Engineer; $200K–$225K+ 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** TBMC moves real money on top of a well-built but complex state machine, and that system has to stay provably correct as it grows. The Platform Engineer owns the test harness and correctness guarantees — integration tests, formal verification, and chaos testing across the ledger, netting algorithm, money movement, and payment ordering — plus the internal tooling and dev infra that give a small team the leverage of a big one.

**Responsibilities** - Own the test harness for core systems: integration tests, formal verification, chaos testing across ledger, netting, money movement, and payment ordering. - Build correctness guarantees that let the rest of the team ship faster with confidence. - Design and build internal tools and automation that amplify team productivity. - Own CI/CD, dev environments, and deployment infra — make the path to production fast, safe, and boring. - Instrument systems with observability (logging, tracing, alerting) to catch issues before customers do.

**Required Skills** A. 3+ years in platform engineering, developer tooling, infrastructure, or reliability engineering. B. Has built test infrastructure for systems where correctness matters — payments, trading, ledgers, or similar. C. Strong distributed-systems fundamentals; reasons confidently about resilient, correct systems at scale. D. Builds production-grade internal tooling without being asked.

**Bonus Skills** - Formal verification, property-based testing, or chaos engineering. - Stablecoin / blockchain familiarity (teachable; not required).

**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–$225K+ base + equity on a 6-year vest (outsized equity for early hires). - Work authorization: Visa sponsorship is fine. For sponsored candidates, flag the candidate's exact current visa status and the filing timelines they're expecting, so the team can plan. - Benefits/Other: Medical/dental/vision, unlimited PTO, periodic off-sites.

**Ideal Background** - Strongest signal — platform/infra/SRE or correctness-focused engineers from payments, trading, or ledger systems (trading firms: Jane Street, Citadel, HRT; fintechs: Stripe, Block, Brex, Ramp). - Also strong — strong distributed-systems / infra engineers from high-performing big tech who bring a correctness obsession. - Priority focus (per client): security + test harnesses + leveraging AI for correctness. Reactive-only monitoring/DevOps is the lowest priority. - Crypto/stablecoin experience is a plus, not required.

**Green Flags** - Correctness obsession; wants to prove the system right, not just hope it is. - Adversarially minded — constantly thinking about how others might try to break the system. - High urgency and ownership; ships in week one and weighs in on architecture.

**Red Flags** - Reactive-only: just monitoring and responding to incidents, not building correctness/prevention. - Lack of depth or urgency; comfortable only in a structured/corporate environment. - Remote-first as a non-negotiable; multiple very short stints.

**Interview Process** 1. Technical resume + culture-fit screen (~20 min), run in parallel. 2. Take-home. 3. Paid on-site work trial (2 days): Meeting with the team, paired programming and solo programming, shareback session the next day.