Staff Engineer, User Engagement

About Betterment Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease. We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays). About the Role On User Engagement, you will build within a product that guides customers through the most important life events in their financial journey. Whether it’s saving to buy a house or planning for retirement, hundreds of thousands of people rely on us to invest and save their money. If you are passionate about financial wellness and are driven to solve complex problems that make saving and investing simple, this role is for you. As a staff engineer, you'll play an instrumental role in designing and implementing complex systems within the team's domain, guiding your team's full stack development practices and collaborating with other senior engineering leaders to advance Betterment's technology and create high performance, reliability and exceptional developer experience. If you're passionate about delightful customer experiences, building scalable, high-performance web applications and are eager to work in a collaborative, forward-thinking environment, we'd love to have you on our team. This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees. New York City: $200,000 - $238,000 This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus. A Day in the Life: Shape the technical direction for User Engagement, helping define the systems, patterns, and engineering practices behind customer-facing experiences. Partner with engineers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to turn product goals into pragmatic technical plans and phased delivery. Design and build high-quality software across the stack, with a high bar for performance, reliability, observability, and maintainability. Guide complex projects from discovery through release, aligning teammates, clarifying tradeoffs, and helping the team make sound technical decisions. Create leverage for the team by reducing technical friction, improving developer workflows, and making thoughtful investments in architecture and code health. Mentor engineers across levels through feedback, pairing, design reviews, and day-to-day technical leadership. Collaborate with other senior/Staff engineers to evaluate new patterns and technologies, and adopt them thoughtfully when they improve the customer or developer experience. Raise the bar for how we work by sharing knowledge, strengthening engineering practices, and contributing to an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture. What We’re Looking For Proven experience scoping, leading, and delivering complex technical projects from discovery through release. Strong full stack engineering experience, including building customer-facing web applications and the systems that support them. Strong experience in at least one server-side language. We use Ruby on Rails, so experience with Ruby is a plus, but strong fundamentals in languages such as Java, Python, or C# are valuable. Proficiency building frontend applications using React or a similar framework. Experience with GraphQL is a plus. Proficiency with relational databases, including schema design and writing detailed SQL queries. Strong technical judgment, including the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and make pragmatic decisions without compromisi