About the Role:
Elective is a Vancouver-based Series A fintech that has built the industry's first "Learn Now, Pay Later" solution designed to help world-class course creators, coaches, and educators sell more effectively. To date, Elective has supported over 100,000 consumers across North America investing in their education, all underwritten, funded, and serviced by Elective. The company has proven product-market fit with 8+ figures in revenue, more than doubling the business over the last 12 months, all profitably and without any dedicated sales or marketing spend.
As a Senior Software Engineer at Elective, nothing you build is invisible and you'll be in the room for planning, speccing, and debating architectural direction rather than just receiving it. Expect to be talking directly to the people who depend on what you ship: merchants, risk, finance, and customer care. This isn't a role where you inherit a stable codebase and a tidy backlog. You'll be working across a wide product surface, in a system where mistakes have consequences that show up on somebody's loan. If you've worked somewhere like this before and found it energizing rather than exhausting, you'll recognize the shape of it.
Ongoing Responsibilities:
- Contributing to the architectural direction. Helping set the new foundation, and planning the transition from the current system onto it.
- Working across the full product surface: checkout, merchant portal, risk and underwriting engine, loan management, and our public APIs.
- Designing for composition. Small pieces with strong contracts between them, built so the next person extends them rather than works around them. You'll be defining boundaries other engineers build against, and deciding when a shared abstraction is earning its keep and when it's just coupling two things that should have stayed apart.
- Building for correctness on money movement. Every payment, disbursement, and ledger entry either reconciles or we know precisely why it didn't. Failure cases, retries, and recovery paths - not just happy paths.
- Owning the third-party integrations we depend on: payment processors, bank rails, credit bureaus, KYC providers. A meaningful share of the job is other people's APIs and the ways they fail.
- Operating what you ship. When something fails in production at 6pm, an engineer figures out why, and that engineer is sometimes you.
- Building the compliance surface as product: audit trails, access controls, and the evidence a regulated lender has to produce on demand. Work you'll do, not a constraint you'll work around.
- Owning your work from architecture through deployment in six-week cycles built around focus, purpose, and real product accountability - following Shape Up fundamentals.
- Rotating onto Firequad, our bug-hunting and improvement team, for a full six-week cycle when you're not shaped onto a feature. It's how we keep the debt from compounding, and it's the fastest way to learn a system this wide.
Our Stack:
TypeScript and Node throughout. PostgreSQL with Kysely (no ORM), Temporal for durable workflows on the money path, an Nx monorepo, GitLab CI, deployed on DigitalOcean behind Cloudflare. The product surface is a mix we're actively consolidating: Next.js, Vue 2/3, and a large Express service holding the loan engine. We're converging on a Vite React SPA with tRPC over Hono, and clear module boundaries throughout. Tests run against real Postgres via testcontainers. We operate under heavy compliance lending regulations, so tooling, auditability, and access control are first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts.
About You:
- Four or more years of full-stack experience, leaning back-end, with a product-centric mindset. You build focused, functional interfaces rather than heavy UI.
- Strong TypeScript fundamentals. These matter more to us than having used our exact stack. If you've done this work in Go, Python, Java, or C# and want to write TypeScript, say so.
- Real Postgres depth; we do not use ORMs. You've evolved a schema against a live table, reasoned about isolation levels and lock contention, and know why a query got slow rather than guessing at an index.
- Experience with asynchronous and long-running work, and the instincts that come with it: idempotency, retries, partial failure, events arriving out of order. We use Temporal; having used it isn't required, having thought this way is.
- You've worked where the numbers had to be right: ledgers, reconciliation, billing, payments, or similar. The instinct to ask what happens when this doesn't work before asking what happens when it does.
- You've made product decisions you couldn't walk back. You've owned the outcome, not just the output.
- You use LLMs seriously in your daily work and can talk concretely about where they've made you faster and where you've learned not to trust them. We'll ask.
- Clear writing, and the ability to explain a tradeoff to someone in risk, finance, or customer care who doesn't share your context. You'll be in the room with them regularly.
- Opinions about how software should be built and the willingness to argue them. You'll happily spar with a colleague to get to the right answer, and you know the difference between the technically correct solution and the one the business actually needs.
- Comfort operating with autonomy in a regulated environment. We're a small team with no layers between you and the people who wrote the code. Some constraints here can't be engineered away, and the process overhead is real.
- Time in a consequence-aware domain - fintech, health tech, insurance, payments, or anywhere errors land on real people - is a strong plus, not a requirement. The instinct matters more than the industry.
- Legally authorized to work in Canada, and able to be in our downtown Vancouver office three days a week.
Why Elective?
- Strong Traction: Our rapid growth means your work will directly impact thousands of customers, driving our continued success.
- Impact: You will get to shape the culture of Elective. “The early team you build is the company you build.” Your impact will be immediate and lasting.
- Competitive Compensation: we reward exceptional work and want to attract the best talent.
- Laptop & Equipment: We’ll make sure you’re set up for success with a company-owned laptop and relevant accessories.
- Learning & Development Stipend: An annual $1,000 Learning & Development budget for courses, books, conferences, seminars, and more.
- Extended Health Care Benefits: Comprehensive benefits including health, vision, and dental coverage for you and an additional wellness spending account.
This is a hybrid, full-time role based in our downtown Vancouver office. You will be required to work on-site three days per week.
Elective is committed to paying our team members fairly, clearly, and above all, paying for growth. The estimated salary range for this role is $128,000 to $158,000. Your specific salary will be determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal assessment. It is possible to join Elective at a salary above or below this range. This range does not include benefits or the performance bonus, which typically runs up to 10% of salary. You'll continue to have conversations about your career development with your manager, and you'll see your compensation grow over time as you grow with us.
