A Vancouver-based fintech that builds the lending infrastructure for the online education industry - flexible payment options at checkout for courses, coaching programmes, and digital learning communities, with Elective carrying the risk. The company is five years old, founder-led, and profitable.

The company has supported over 100K+ customers, looking to improve themselves through education; all underwritten, funded and serviced through a platform we built from the ground up.

The engineering team is entering something significant: planning for growth and setting the foundation for the company’s next phase, leaning on five years of accumulated knowledge about what Elective actually is and what it needs to do next.

This is not a role for someone looking to join a rigid team and pick up a prescriptive workloadThree engineers are being hired into active foundation-setting - contributing to architectural decisions early, working across a complex product surface, and operating in a system where the consequences of errors are real. The right person has been somewhere like this before and found it energizing rather than overwhelming.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

Contributing to architectural growth - helping set the foundations for Elective's next phase, and participating in planning how the system gets there
Working across the full product surface: checkout, merchant portal, risk and underwriting engine, loan management system, APIs and services
Building toward 99.8% certainty on critical business operations - thinking in failure cases and recovery paths, not just happy paths
Bringing best practices to a codebase being rebuilt from the ground up, with a genuine invitation to do it better
Owning your work from architecture to deployment in an eight-week cycle model built around focus, purpose, and real product accountability using the ShapeUp methodology from 37signals
Building focused, functional interfaces over heavy UI

WHAT YOU BRING
Four to seven years of full-stack experience, with a lean toward back-end and a product-centric mindset
Experience building in a consequence-aware environment - fintech, health tech, insurance, or anywhere that errors have real impact on real people
The instinct to ask what happens when this does not work before you ask what happens when it does
Comfort operating with autonomy in a high-context, low-documentation environment - you ramp through doing, not through being taught
Opinions about how things should be built, and the pragmatism to know when to hold them and when to adapt
Previous experience making product decisions you couldn't walk back - you've owned the outcome, not just the output
You invest in your tools - including LLMs - and have formed opinions through trial and error about how you work best
You'll happily spar with your co-workers to reach a solution - and you understand the nuance between the correct outcome and the right outcome

THE STACK
Node.js - Express and tRPC
Vue.js and React
Tailwind and Daisy UI
Postgres
Temporal
Redis
Digital Ocean (droplets, managed apps, buckets)
GitLab
NX

THE DETAILS
Compensation $110,000 - $140,000 base, based on experience, plus 10% performance bonus (~$120,000 - $155,000 OTE)
Location Vancouver, BC - Hybrid (minimum 3 days per week in office)
Reporting line Co-Founder and Head of Engineering