Platform Engineer

**The Better Money Company** Platform 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** 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 with ownership of correctness. Observability and DevOps-weighted profiles do not qualify. 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. E. Security engineering exposure.

**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+ 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 — 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. - Crypto/stablecoin experience is a plus, not required. - 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** - Correctness obsession; wants to prove the system right, not just hope it is. - High urgency and ownership; ships in week one and weighs in on architecture. - Strong opinions on internal tooling; builds leverage unprompted. - Demonstrated track record of operating autonomously from day one; hits the ground running without heavy ramp-up support.

**Red Flags** - Lack of depth or urgency; comfortable only in a structured/corporate environment. - Doesn't take money-movement responsibility seriously. - Deep in one lane only. Verbatim rejection: "Too specialized on data to keep up across the platform. I'll pass." - 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.)