Company Description

We have an internet for money - but still can't tell real companies apart from fake ones. Cobalt ID is building the business identity infrastructure for the financial internet. While others focus on consumers, we separate real companies from synthetic ones.

With AI accelerating fraud rings and shell companies at global scale, distinguishing a legitimate business from a sophisticated fraudster is now one of the hardest problems in fintech. We’re mapping 100M+ businesses and counting to expose hidden financial crime networks and ensure real businesses are never left out of the financial ecosystem.

Role Description

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll be one of the early technical hires building the systems that power our platform. You'll work across the stack, writing production code that powers graph-based network analysis, scaling infrastructure to serve API requests in seconds, and shipping features that directly impact how leading financial institutions catch fraud.

The problems are genuinely hard and mostly unsolved by the industry. Similar infrastructure powers leading social media platforms, search engines, and data fusion platforms, but hasn't yet been applied to this problem. This is a high-output role for someone who thrives on building: you'll write a lot of code, move fast, and see your work in production within days, not quarters. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with the founding team and have direct access to customers and their data.

This is a full-time on-site role for a Staff Software Engineer located in New York, NY.

What you'll do:

• Build and ship production features across the platform: backend services, APIs, graph query layers, and customer-facing tools

• Develop infrastructure that serves inference and network analysis results in real time with high accuracy and low latency

• Solve hard implementation problems: identity resolution at scale, real-time signal processing, explainable risk scoring for compliance

• Build integrations with customer systems. Financial institutions have high reliability and auditability standards, and you'll own meeting them

• Write clean, reliable code and move through a complex, evolving codebase quickly

• Collaborate directly with founders and customers to understand the problem deeply and ship what matters

Base Qualifications

• 3+ years building production backend systems (we care more about skill and impact than years alone)

• Strong coding ability - you write production-quality code, reason clearly about system design, and can move through a complex codebase quickly

• Experience with data-intensive systems - you've worked with large datasets, built pipelines, or operated services at meaningful scale

• Comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration in an early-stage environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in fintech, fraud detection, or identity systems

• Experience with graph databases, entity resolution, or network analysis

• Experience scaling infrastructure under real production load

• Experience with ML model serving or inference infrastructure in production

• You're a tinkerer - you have side projects, contribute to open source, and are actively building with AI tools

The Team:

We’re a small, tight-knit, and highly technical team. Our founders and early team members come from Waymo, Google, Meta, Brex, and Virtu Financial. We value technical depth and curiosity, low ego, and fast execution.

We’ve partnered with investors who understand the plumbing of the global financial system. We recently raised a round led by Nyca Partners, with participation from operators who built the modern fintech stack at Ramp, Plaid, and Brex.

Compensation Range: $140K - $200K