Founding Engineer, Backend & Infrastructure

Why we are building Zero

Sree: For nearly a decade, personal finance was my second job. I built infrastructure at NVIDIA, founded a company acquired by Harvey, and helped build Harvey’s early engineering team. Through all of it, I spent nights teaching myself how to manage equity, investments, retirement accounts, and taxes. I built spreadsheets, paid advisors, and became the person friends came to with financial questions.

Knowing all that did not protect me. I still missed decisions across my equity and taxes that could have saved me tens of thousands of dollars. I only uncovered these after we built an early version of Zero.

Isaac: My family lost everything in the 2008 crash. I grew up determined to understand how to build and protect financial security, teaching myself about investing at Princeton and eventually making it my career. At Alpine Investors, I worked closely with wealth management and accounting businesses and saw how valuable skilled advice could be. I also saw the catch: you had to know a decision mattered before you knew to ask for help. I knew how easy that moment was to miss: despite everything I’d learned, mistakes with my own investments have cost me more than $50,000.

When we met, we recognized the same pattern in our stories. We had both put in the work to understand our finances, yet consequential decisions still slipped by. Catching those moments takes continuous, coordinated attention – the kind that once required an entire team. We’re building Zero to give everyone that attention: to see the whole picture, identify the right moves at the right time, and help people follow through.

What you will build

Zero is building a financial system that goes beyond answering questions. By combining financial data, deterministic calculations, AI reasoning, and reliable execution, we’re building a system that understands a member’s financial life, identifies opportunities, and helps them act.

You’ll build the infrastructure that makes this possible, from maintaining an accurate financial picture to executing transactions reliably across financial institutions. You’ll work across the stack when needed, with your deepest ownership in backend services, data, and infrastructure.

• Build a reliable financial foundation. Bring brokerage accounts, payroll, equity, taxes, and other financial data into a coherent model of a household. Handle incomplete records, conflicting sources, changing information, and historical state so the rest of Zero can reason and act with confidence.
• Build systems that move and manage money. Develop the infrastructure behind trading, portfolio management, transfers, and other financial actions. Integrate with external financial institutions, manage transaction lifecycles, and reconcile what Zero intended to happen with what actually happened.
• Make execution durable. Build workflows that can run across services and institutions, sometimes over hours or days. Design for retries, duplicate requests, partial failures, delayed responses, and recovery without losing track of what happened or repeating irreversible actions.
• Make authorization enforceable. Translate member approvals, preferences, and limits into explicit system constraints. Maintain a traceable record of recommendations, authorization, execution, and outcomes, with clear boundaries around what Zero can do autonomously.
• Connect intelligence to real-world action. Build the APIs and services that connect financial data, deterministic calculations, and agentic reasoning to the product. Make it possible for Zero to distinguish verified facts from assumptions, request missing information, and execute decisions safely.

Who you are

• You’ve built backend systems that people depend on and owned them through production. You understand the tradeoffs behind their architecture and what it takes to operate them reliably.
• You’re strong with APIs, relational databases, and external integrations. Python and Postgres are core to our stack, and you can get productive in them quickly.
• You think carefully about state, consistency, and failure. You know how to design workflows that remain correct through retries, duplicate requests, partial execution, and reconciliation. Experience with durable workflow systems such as Temporal is a plus.
• You care about data integrity and traceability. You understand that a system needs to know where its information came from, how current it is, and whether it is sufficient to act.
• You take ownership of the less visible work, including testing, observability, debugging, and recovery, because you care about the outcome, not just whether the code shipped.
• You can turn ambiguous requirements into well-designed systems, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and work closely with product and research engineers.
• You enjoy building in a small team, share context early, and welcome direct feedback. Experience with financial infrastructure or early-stage startups is a plus.

Why join Zero

• Work on the financial decisions that shape people’s lives. You’ll help people make every dollar count to support their families, build wealth, and plan for the future.
• Join an extraordinary team. You’ll work with people who are among the best at what they do and ambitious about what we can build together. We challenge ideas directly, share context, and help one another get better.
• Build AI people can trust with their money. Zero is already finding moves that matter. You’ll build the systems that make the numbers dependable and the actions reliable, with members in control.
• Help shape what Zero becomes. You’ll work directly with us and with members to decide what matters, then build the foundations that determine what Zero can safely do for them.

Compensation and process

Base salary is $250K–$350K, set by level. We will not offer below $250K for this role. You’ll also receive equity.

Benefits include 100% coverage for health, dental, and vision, plus 80% health coverage for dependents. They also include a 401(k), commuter benefits, daily meals, and the tools you need to do your best work.

Apply using the form below. If there’s a fit, your first conversation is a 30-minute informal chat with Sree. We move quickly and tailor the rest of the process to your circumstances, so you can get a real feel for the work and the team.