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Staff Software Engineer

Clerq

Clerq

Software Engineering
New York, NY, USA
USD 180k-210k / year + Equity
Posted on Oct 28, 2025

Overview

Clerq is a Series A financial technology startup based in New York City. The company’s next generation payments platform delivers a seamless checkout experience for high-ticket transactions.

Leveraging modern bank rails, the platform offers the conversion and UX benefits of cards with risk and money movement infrastructure purpose-built for large purchases. Clerq replaces outdated manual payment methods like cash, checks and wires and expensive card surcharges with a smooth, integrated solution that helps merchants convert more customers without sacrificing margins.

Clerq started with the $1T+ U.S. auto vertical, where it's already powering payments for several of the most recognized brands in the industry. With proven traction, the company has expanded into high-growth adjacencies including powersports, home & office and private travel.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our early engineering team. The ideal candidate is eager to join an early stage company with strong product-market fit and excited to build a robust platform capable of powering billions of dollars of payment volume. As an early engineering team member, you will be critical to the development of Clerq's core platform and help support the business through its hyper growth phase. You will collaborate closely with the CTO and the rest of the team, owning key projects from inception through implementation. Our ideal candidate is someone who is excited by our mission and the opportunity to continually take on more responsibility as the company scales.

About the role

  • Own and ship core components of our payments platform including:

    • core money movement and payments operations functions

    • integrations with third-party business systems

    • performance tuning and scaling

    • reporting and compliance functionality

  • Design robust and maintainable system architectures

  • Contribute to the design of customer-facing APIs

  • Own the delivery of new features from end-to-end

  • Iterate on internal infrastructure and developer experience such as observability

  • Help improve engineering processes and shape the team’s culture

  • Maintain high standards of engineering excellence and establish/iterate on best practices throughout the team

  • Help interview, onboard, and mentor new hires as the team grows

  • Location: NYC (Flatiron)

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience (comfort with Python/Django strongly preferred)

  • Previous (early stage) startup experience strongly preferred

  • Ability to write and debug production-quality backend code

  • Ability to evaluate the tradeoffs between speed and robustness when designing systems

  • Strong and proactive communication skills

  • Ability to articulate customer impact of technical

  • Preferred but not required:

    • Experience with AWS services, PostgreSQL, Redis

    • Prior experience or demonstrated interest in payments and/or fintech

Salary range: $180,000-$210,000

Employee compensation also includes equity incentives and certain benefits. Final offer terms are based on by multiple factors including experience and skills, and may potentially vary from the amounts initially listed.