About Ottimate Ottimate is an AI-powered AP [Accounts Payable] automation platform that empowers finance teams to reduce costs, prevent overpayments, detect fraud, and enforce policy compliance across the entire invoice-to-payment lifecycle.
About the role We’re looking for a capable, growth-minded software engineer to join our team as its third engineer. This is an ideal opportunity for an early-to-mid-career engineer who wants meaningful ownership, close collaboration with experienced teammates, and the opportunity to grow quickly. Our team solves real customer problems across a mature financial platform. The work ranges from building product features to investigating production incidents, improving database performance, strengthening security boundaries, and maintaining reliable accounting and payment workflows. We use AI-assisted development tools extensively, but we do not treat generated code as automatically correct. A successful engineer in this role will know how to use tools such as Claude Code or Codex to navigate unfamiliar systems and accelerate development while remaining responsible for correctness, security, testing, and operational safety. You do not need experience with every technology or with fintech. We care more about strong fundamentals, curiosity, sound judgment, and the ability to learn quickly.
Responsibilities
- Build, test, and maintain backend product features, primarily using Python, Django, and relational databases.
- Use AI coding tools to investigate problems, implement changes, write tests, and improve documentation.
- Critically review AI-generated code for correctness, security, performance, and maintainability.
- Turn customer feedback into reproducible technical problems, fix the root cause, check whether customer data was affected, and update it.
- Translate ambiguous customer feedback into reproducible technical problems and practical product improvements.
- Own work from initial investigation through implementation, testing, QA, deployment verification, and follow-up.
- Build and maintain APIs, asynchronous jobs, integrations, internal tools, and data-processing workflows.
- Write clear, maintainable code with appropriate automated test coverage.
- Participate in code reviews and technical discussions with the rest of the engineering team.
- Improve system reliability, observability, documentation, and development processes.
- Protect financial correctness, tenant isolation, data integrity, auditability, and customer privacy.
- Gradually take ownership of larger features and technical decisions as you grow in the role.
- Professional software engineering experience at an early-to-mid-career level.
- Strong working knowledge of Python.
- Experience designing, querying, and debugging applications backed by relational databases.
- Familiarity with APIs, automated testing, Git, and collaborative software-development practices.
- Experience using AI-assisted coding tools in real development work.
- The ability to evaluate and validate generated code rather than accepting it automatically.
- Strong debugging skills, including in an unfamiliar codebase, and the habit of asking what a bug did to customer data, then helping correct it.
- An understanding of common application concerns such as authorization, concurrency, retries, idempotency, and failure handling.
- Clear written and verbal communication.
- A careful approach to systems that handle sensitive business and financial data.
- Comfort working on a small team with broad ownership and changing priorities.
- Curiosity, humility, and a willingness to ask questions, receive feedback, and learn new systems.
Nice to have
- Experience with Django or another Python web framework.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, query analysis, and database-performance optimization.
- Familiarity with Celery or another asynchronous job-processing system.
- Experience with AWS, ECS, Docker, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with observability tools such as ClickStack, Sentry, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience with TypeScript, Angular, or another modern frontend framework.
- Experience building or maintaining fintech, accounting, accounts-payable, payments, or ERP-integration software.
- Experience working directly with customers, support teams, or other non-engineering stakeholders.
- Familiarity with access controls, audit trails, data remediation, and safe bulk-data operations.
- Experience supporting production systems or participating in incident investigation.
What makes someone successful in this role
- You’ll thrive here if you are pragmatic, dependable, and comfortable working through ambiguity. You should enjoy understanding how systems behave in the real world - not just writing code from a ticket.
- The strongest candidate will use AI to move faster while retaining ownership of the result. They will verify assumptions, test important behavior, consider failure cases, and communicate clearly when something remains uncertain.
- We are not looking for someone who already knows every technology or financial concept we use. We’re looking for a generally capable engineer with good instincts, customer empathy, and a strong learning mindset.
- This role offers close collaboration and mentorship from experienced engineers, along with the opportunity to make a visible impact on a growing product and engineering team.
We care deeply about making Ottimate an incredible place to work and invest a significant amount of time and energy into creating and maintaining a company culture that provides our team with a generous level of support whilst inspiring them to do their best work.
The specific benefits/perks we offer are continually evolving, but currently include:
- Salary Range: USD $130,000-155,000 (depending on level) per year + annual bonus.
- Medical, Dental, Vision, and other Company-Subsidized Benefits for you and your family.
- Employer-sponsored 401(k) with company match.
- Paid Time Off (and the encouragement to use it).
- Promote from within philosophy.
Beyond the tangible benefits, though:
- You will be part of a growing team, at a pinnacle moment of scale for the business, and experience the excitement of working in a startup where each action makes a huge difference.
- You will have the agency to solve difficult problems creatively, the freedom to explore work that inspires you, and infrastructure to ensure you're constantly challenged and developing.
- You will work with sharp, passionate teammates solving some of the most unique challenges and positioning our product as a premier finance automation solution.
- Our commitment to empowering a diverse and inclusive workforce, celebrating differences, and creating a safe space for our employees to bring their whole selves to work is second to note.
- We are transforming entire industries using innovative technology, including Artificial Intelligence, Payment Tech, and Neural Networks.
- Our leaders lead with a people-first approach; inspiring excellence, nurturing ideas, and finding creative ways to eliminate obstacles for cultivating growth.
- We truly love what we do and who we do it with - and we think you will too!
Ottimate is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, religion, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability status, or marital status. If you are excited about the role but do not meet 100% of the qualifications listed above, we encourage you to apply. Nothing in this job posting should be construed as an offer or guarantee of employment.
