L3 Software Engineer
Overview
Job Title: L3 Software Engineer
Location: New York, NY (In-Office)
Reports To: Chief Technology Officer
Our Journey
Sparrow started in 2020 as a marketplace for private student loans (think Expedia but for higher education financing). As we garnered traction in the d2c space, we were approached by several performance marketers and financial institutions who saw tremendous value in our product. However, these prospective partners wanted to offer the student loan marketplace to their users while maintaining brand continuity. So, in late 2022, we built a white-labeled student loan marketplace with backdoor reporting and marketing capabilities. We named the b2b product “Crest.”
Over the next year, we leaned into the demand for Crest and quickly identified credit unions as our ideal customer profile. Credit unions are one of America’s best-kept secrets. They offer tremendous financial products and provide a white-glove, community-oriented approach to banking reminiscent of a bygone era. However, Credit Unions are struggling to compete in the digital era, and their average membership age is climbing up and to the right. Providing access to a financial product that’s relevant to a younger demographic, like student loans, struck a chord with CU executives who were searching for a way to bring in younger members. Crest became their strategy.
Throughout 2024, we spent hundreds of hours working with our newly partnered Credit Unions to promote and drive traffic to their student loan marketplaces. In the process, we discovered that most Credit Unions had limited, and in many cases non-existent, marketing capabilities. The trend of declining membership plaguing the CU industry could be boiled down to an awareness issue. It doesn't matter if your local Credit Union could save you thousands of dollars on a car loan or mortgage if you’ve only ever heard of a big-name bank. This was our key insight in 2024, and we’ve spent the last 6 months building out an automated marketing platform loaded with prescriptive content and strategies to equip even the smallest CU with the digital tools needed to grow and strengthen their member base.
About the Company
Sparrow is a high-growth, post-seed, fintech startup based in New York City. We are modernizing how financial institutions lend, engage, and market to their members and have experienced tremendous, profitable growth in 2024, scaling ARR from $0 to $1MM in under 12 months. We’re accelerating even faster in 2025, and we’re looking for a Software Engineer (SWE) to help us drive our continued growth.
About the Team
Our team works collaboratively at a fast clip and comes to decisions quickly. We value the merit of a solution and are unencumbered by organizational hierarchy - everyone has a seat at the table and contributes to shaping our product roadmap.
You’ll be working with a small team of developers and operators. While your role is technical, you’ll be interfacing with everyone on the team to identify and solve problems for our rapidly expanding client base and feature sets.
Here are some of the people you’ll work the closest with:
Griffin (CTO): Penn Wharton and Engineering dual degree, Forbes 30 under 30, Sparrow Co-founder.
Alex (Sr. Software Engineer): From NYU mathematics to Investment Banking at Nomura, Alex pivoted from the world of finance to software engineering. Former experience at Olive.
Camden (Director of Product): Duke undergrad, worked in management consulting before joining the Sparrow team as hire #1 and scaled ARR to $1M+
Harrison Hochman (CEO): Stanford Undergrad and Grad, Forbes 30 under 30, 7x marathons, Sparrow Co-founder.
What you’ll do:
- Full-stack Development: Develop well-architected, responsive, and performant web applications across backend and frontend codebases.
- Backend Development (60-70%): Design and implement scalable APIs and backend services with a strong emphasis on security and performance working with AWS infrastructure and Express/TypeScript/NoSQL DynamoDB.
- Frontend Development (30-40%): Create seamless, user-friendly interfaces using React and modern frontend technologies (HTML/CSS/Typescript/React/Redux/REST APIs).
- Implementation Planning: Collaborate with engineering and product to plan feature sets, balancing business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation.
- Iterative Review: Bring your voice to the table in team collaborations on architecture, design, and code reviews
- End-to-End Delivery: Take full ownership of delivery tasks, including design, development, testing, deployment, configuration, and documentation, to ensure business requirements are met with high quality.
- Quality & Reliability: Write automated tests to ensure system stability and proactively debug and resolve technical issues.
- Uphold Code Excellence & Standards: Write clean, testable, and maintainable backend and frontend code and bring consistency to the many codebases and processes you will encounter.
You should be excited by:
- Impact: The code you write will directly impact dozens of clients and thousands of users, probably within your first week.
- Ownership: You will be given an incredible amount of autonomy to solve engineering problems independently.
- Mentorship: We’re deeply invested in our collective success, which means that we hold each other to a high standard and hit pause to help each other grow through live feedback (we’re in-office 4 days a week), extensive code review, collaborative whiteboarding, and fireside chats.
We’re excited about you because…
- 2+ years of professional experience post-graduation in software engineering, ideally in an early-stage startup or similarly fast-paced environment
- Have a demonstrated record of excellence in delivering highly reliable and available software systems
- You take strong ownership of your work product, set clear expectations, and err on the side of over-communication
- Start with first principles and consider design and UX sensibilities with the ability to build based on an established design.
- You’re congenial to simple solutions and designs over complex ones and have a strong intuition for what will last and scale.
- Have experience with version control, continuous integration, and continuous delivery concepts
- We think you’ll positively influence the culture, values, and processes of a growing engineering team
Extra things we would love you to have…
- Experience working with AWS services, including Amazon OpenSearch Service, Simple Email Service (SES), and Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Experience with Tailwind CSS
Qualities we’re looking for
- Opinionated: You’ll be shaping the future of our software, and we want you to have a point of view on the best path forward
- Proactive: Identifying challenges up front and taking action to mitigate them is critical to succeeding in a fast-paced environment
- Communication skills: Effective communication is the foundation of all the work that you’ll be involved in
- Conviction: You confidently stand by your decisions, backing them with logic and experience while remaining open to feedback and new perspectives.
- Self-Reflective: You continuously assess your work, seek ways to improve, and welcome constructive criticism as a tool for growth.
Our process
- Phone screen - 15 Min
- Technical screen (CTO) - 30 Min
- Take-home assignment
- Take-home review and live coding exercise (backend focused) – 1 hr to 1 hr 15 mins
- Final round on-site
- System design interview - 1hr
- Behavioral interview (COO / Director of Ops) - 1hr
- Zoom call - Vision / Role Expectations (CEO) - 30 - 45mins
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion
We're committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company. That's why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunities to excel.