Staff Backend Engineer (Automation + Systems)

About Heard

Heard is the financial operating system for independent health and wellness providers. We handle bookkeeping, taxes, payroll, and compliance so clinicians can focus on their patients, not paperwork.

We’ve crossed $10M+ ARR and ~4,500 customers, and the next phase of the company is about leverage. Our goal is simple and non-negotiable: Build a system where adding customers doesn’t require adding people. This role will be critical in supporting the next phase of growth at Heard.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to help us automate the financial back office for providers at scale. This role is about building systems that replace manual work, not interfaces that hide it. Your role will have real, tangible impact on both the business and customers lives; making it easy for providers to handle their financial and legal back office.

In this role, you will be a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer focused on automation and system reliability. You’ll work closely with the CEO, engineering, product, and domain experts to design and ship systems that materially reduce manual work and operational cost.  

This is not a people-management role. It is a technical leadership role grounded in day-to-day engineering work such as; writing production code, owning critical systems end-to-end, and setting standards through implementation, not delegation.

• Design and build automation systems for reconciliation, categorization, and close
• Improve general ledger (GL) correctness and double-entry accounting workflows
• Own reliability and failure modes for high-volume financial data pipelines
• Partner with ML and data experts to productionize supervised models and LLM-assisted workflows
• Build lifecycle orchestration that moves customers forward without human intervention
• Reduce ops load through software, not process
• Set technical standards for backend systems that prioritize correctness and leverage
• Mentor other engineers through example, code reviews, and architectural judgment

• 7–10+ years of backend engineering experience, preferably in the fintech space
• Deep experience building data-heavy, failure-prone systems
• Strong judgment around automation, edge cases, and system tradeoffs
• Comfort owning ambiguous, high-stakes problems without a playbook
• Experience working close to the business and caring about margin, not just code quality
• Fluency in modern backend stacks (ML/LLM experience a major bonus)
• Have held previous positions such as Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Senior Tech Lead

• You’ll work directly on Heard's most existential problems
• Your work will have immediate impact on margin, scale, and survival
• You’ll have real ownership, not a narrow ticket queue
• You’ll earn early-stage equity in a business that is already working
• We’re in execution mode, not “will anyone buy this?” mode

• You’re confident operating in ambiguity, and helping define the problem, not just executing on specs
• You prefer backend systems and data correctness over UI work or surface level features
• You’re comfortable being directly accountable for business outcomes 
• You can make progress without relying on heavy process, layers, or broad consensus
• You care deeply about customers or data integrity