Principal Software Engineer, Pricing Platform

About this role

About Upstart

At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.

As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 3,000 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress.

We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City (opening Summer 2026), you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you.

If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.

The Team:

Upstart's Core Pricing team drives key initiatives that directly influence our revenue streams, unit economics, and product strategy. The team builds and evolves the common systems used to translate underwriting insights into accurate risk and profitability decisions for every loan we originate, while enabling a seamless borrower experience across products.

As a Principal Software Engineer on Core Pricing, you will provide technical leadership that spans engineering, machine learning, and product organizations — not just the Pricing team. You will shape the long-term architecture, strategy, and operating model for pricing systems that serve multiple product lines and stakeholders across the company. Working in close partnership with engineering, ML, product, and business leaders across Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, and adjacent platforms, you will lead the development of scalable, low-latency, highly reliable services that convert ML underwriting outputs into pricing decisions, and you will help define the future of Upstart's pricing platform as the company expands into new products, markets, and capabilities.

Our stack spans Python (Django, FastAPI, Celery), Kotlin/Spring Boot, gRPC/Protobuf, Temporal for workflow orchestration, AWS (S3, RDS/Postgres, ElastiCache), Kubernetes/Helm, and Datadog for observability.

How you'll make an impact

• Define the cross-company technical vision and roadmap for Upstart's pricing platform, ensuring alignment across Pricing, Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, ML, and Product organizations.

• Lead the architectural evolution from tightly coupled, sequential workflows toward modular, reusable platform capabilities across loan products.

• Design and improve Tier 0/Tier 1 services where latency, throughput, availability, and financial correctness are all critical.

• Partner closely with machine-learning scientists and engineers to create reliable, scalable boundaries between models and production pricing systems.

• Balance the sometimes-competing needs of engineering, machine learning, and product teams across organizations, making pragmatic trade-offs that serve Upstart's broader technical and business strategy.

• Clarify service, API, configuration, and ownership boundaries across Pricing, Personal Loans, Auto, HELOC, and adjacent platform teams.

• Evaluate runtime and language choices pragmatically, including where Python, Kotlin, Rust or Go best serve long-term system needs.

• Reduce operational burden through better testing, observability, failure isolation, incident learning, and architecture that limits blast radius.

• Lead company-wide technical discussions, surface trade-offs clearly, and build alignment across Engineering, ML, Product, Data, Security, Compliance, and business partners.

• Stay close to implementation through design reviews, prototypes, and critical code while mentoring senior technical leaders and making the people around you more successful.

• Prioritize technical-debt and platform investments based on business value, risk reduction, and long-term return rather than technical elegance alone.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience - plus 8 or more years of software engineering experience.

• A track record of setting architecture and technical direction for large, complex distributed systems used across multiple teams or products.

• Deep backend engineering experience and production proficiency in at least one of Python, Kotlin, or Java; willingness and ability to work effectively in a predominantly Python environment.

• Experience designing or operating Tier 0/Tier 1 services with demanding latency, throughput, availability, and correctness requirements.

• Strong understanding of APIs, service-oriented or modular architectures, containerization, cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS), and maintainable software design.

• Hands-on technical judgment: you can move from strategy and architecture into concrete designs, prototypes, debugging, and critical implementation decisions.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex systems, constraints, and trade-offs to technical and nontechnical audiences.

• Demonstrated success leading cross-organization technical decisions — balancing the needs of engineering, machine learning, and product te

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