Senior Software Engineer in Vancouver

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.
• Building for correctness on money movement. Every payment, disbursement, and ledger entry either reconciles or we know precisely why it didn't.
• Owning the third-party integrations we depend on: payment processors, bank rails, credit bureaus, KYC providers.
• 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.
• Owning your work from architecture through deployment in six-week cycles built around focus, purpose, and real product accountability.
• Rotating onto Firequad, our bug-hunting and improvement team, for a full six-week cycle when you're not shaped onto a feature.

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.
• Strong TypeScript fundamentals.
• Real Postgres depth; we do not use ORMs.
• Experience with asynchronous and long-running work.
• You've worked where the numbers had to be right: ledgers, reconciliation, billing, payments, or similar.
• You've made product decisions you couldn't walk back.
• You use LLMs seriously in your daily work.
• Clear writing, and the ability to explain a tradeoff to someone in risk, finance, or customer care.
• Opinions about how software should be built and the willingness to argue them.
• Comfort operating with autonomy in a regulated environment.
• Time in a consequence-aware domain — fintech, health tech, insurance, payments, or anywhere errors land on real people — is a strong plus.
• 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.
• 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.