Description

At ZestFinance, we’re changing the way finance works, from how people borrow money to the way that credit decisions are made.  Our ZAML platform is used by some of the world's largest companies to transform their credit businesses, and more companies are signing up every week.  

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about building amazing enterprise services with cutting edge technologies in a lean and fast environment. You want to join an organization focused on delivering cutting edge machine learning technologies to large enterprises, where the systems you build allow our customers to capture huge (100m+) economic benefits.

You will be joining a team of 30+ highly-skilled full stack engineers and world class data scientists, where you will be contributing your software design and systems development skills. You will have the opportunity and broad purview to improve team efficiency and productivity by setting high quality engineering standards. This is a hands-on position, and you will have many opportunities to pair with junior and senior developers and data scientists, delivering features while reinforcing engineering best practices.

We practice pairing and TDD in a Ruby on Rails (RoR) environment with an AngularJS + Rails + MySQL stack. We use Docker for containerization and deployments. Our data warehouse / reporting stack is S3 / RedShift / Looker based.  Our enterprise deployments are installed in the customer's data centers and integrate with a myriad of legacy technologies. We deliver data science tools and models in R.

It’s not required that you have experience with these technologies; rather, Zest is looking for someone who can learn quickly so we can take advantage of new technologies and adapt to customer requirements.  

In this role you will:

• Mentoring and pairing effectively with other developers and data scientists to deliver high-quality code, code reviews.
• Innovating technical design and systems architecture across services and applications.
• Establishing and reinforcing engineering best practices and company culture.
• Participating in the hiring process to grow our engineering team with an ever-rising quality bar.
• Partnering with product management and the business to define and deliver the ZestFinance product roadmap.
• Delivering highly available business critical systems.
• Increasing team skill level in areas of software design and systems architecture.
• Improving team efficiency and productivity with process improvement ideas.
• Partnering with product management to lead technical requirements gathering discussions with customers.

We are looking for: 

• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience followed by 8+ years experience in a senior developer or architect role; Ideally, you have delivered business critical software to large enterprises.
• Hands-on coding experience in Ruby, Python, or similar.
• Experience designing APIs adhering to the REST architecture style.
• Ability to analyze and troubleshoot large-scale distributed systems (network analysis, performance and application issues).
• Experience with Continuous integration tools (e.g. Github, Travis CI, Jenkins), Amazon Web Services (e.g. EC2, RDS, S3, and Route53), Monitoring/alerting tools (e.g. New Relic, Airbrake, PagerDuty).
• Experience with Docker for provisioning servers and deploying applications/services.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills including the ability to explain technical issues to a non-technical audience, along with a strong work ethic and a can-do attitude.

Perks and benefits:

• People – the best part of Zest
• Competitive salary and equity grants
• Robust healthcare plans, matching 401K and unlimited vacation time
• Dog friendly office with lounge areas, video games and gigantic jigsaw puzzles
• On-site gym with employee run fitness classes
• Generous family leave policy (6 month maternity leave/3 month paternity leave)
• Tuition reimbursement, conference allowance and Zest talks
• Complimentary massages, manicures, pedicures and more
• Daily catered lunches from LA’s best restaurants and fully stocked kitchen 

About ZestFinance:

ZestFinance, Inc. applies its unique credit-decisioning technology platform — based on data science and machine learning — to help lenders effectively predict credit risk so they can increase revenues, reduce risk and ensure compliance. ZestFinance was founded in 2009 by Douglas Merrill and a team of former Google employees with the mission of making fair and transparent credit available to everyone.

We are committed to diversity in hiring, professional development, and everyday discussion.  Zest is determined to hire crazy smart people who are different from each other to create broad thinking, lots of different ideas, and by extension, the best team possible.