About Meadow

Meadow is the modern payments platform for higher education that simplifies the entire student financial experience. We're transforming the $600 Billion higher education payments industry in the United States — building for universities what Shopify built for retail businesses, and bringing the entire student financial experience online.

The need for a platform like Meadow has never been greater. If you're passionate about our mission to empower students financially and strengthen economic mobility through higher education — and you're excited to join a highly ambitious, talented team — we'd love to hear from you.

About the Role

Overview

Meadow is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale our student financial engagement platform, Meadow Pay. As we continue expanding to universities nationwide, this role will be critical in delivering reliable, scalable product experiences for our institutional partners and their students.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate core systems across our backend and frontend stack, partnering closely with Product, CX, and Integrations to deliver high-quality software. This role requires strong technical judgment, a high bar for quality, and a desire to take ownership of meaningful product areas from concept through production.

AI tooling (e.g. Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc.) is a core part of how our team works and ships code every day. We're looking for a Software Engineer who is excited to use AI as a core part of their workflow. The ideal candidate should have experience building products in a way that AI tooling can efficiently understand context and collaborate with the user.

This is a full-time position reporting to Mike, Meadow's Engineering Manager.

What You'll Do

You'll lead end-to-end development of product features from design through deployment and ongoing support.

You'll architect and build scalable backend services and APIs (TypeScript/Node.js).

You'll contribute to frontend development using modern frameworks (React preferred).

You'll design systems with reliability, observability, and maintainability in mind.

You'll collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, CX, and Integrations teams to deliver customer-facing functionality.

You'll participate in code reviews and uphold high standards for code quality and system design.

You'll improve engineering processes, tooling, and documentation to support scale.

You'll help shape technical decisions and engineering culture as we grow.

About You

What You Bring

5+ Years of Experience in Product Engineering

You have experience building and operating production systems at scale.

Ownership

Builder Mindset: You demonstrate High Agency x High Urgency.

You own problems end-to-end.

You make consequential decisions that impact outcomes.

Agency: You make bigger calls on your own. You own the scope, approach, and tradeoffs for your projects without needing sign-off, and default to action when the path is ambiguous.

Decisions: The team trusts your call, as you are usually right. You estimate accurately and credibly, rarely make the same mistake twice, and correct fast when wrong.

Operational Excellence: You make operating our system a top concern. You instrument and document proactively, so things are debuggable and supportable before they break.

Product Sense

Empathy: You keep a steady rhythm of contact with your users, external or internal (IE, CX), across your area: support tickets, integration issues, calls, telemetry. You understand the desired outcomes and surface patterns worth acting on.

Creativity: You form opinions on what to build, not just how. You generate and propose solutions to problems worth solving, including ones beyond their assigned work.

Taste: You judge which options actually move the needle on user outcomes and back them. You help teammates see defects and product-sense gaps, raising the bar around you.

Technical Depth

Design & Architecture: You are trusted to lead engineering design on any project. You understand the why behind the architecture and see second-order effects, including how a component behaves as usage grows, and make calls that are not obvious to others.