Founding Backend Engineer
Engineering · Full-time · Founding role · San Francisco, CA (onsite)
About Lane
Lane is building the financial infrastructure for the agentic web. Our job is to turn intent into action: to give AI agents a dependable way to reach businesses, prove who they're acting for, and pay for what they buy. The first internet was built for eyes and fingers, the second for apps and walled gardens. We're building the third, a web built for agents. Two products carry that. Agent Wallet issues programmable, scope-limited payment credentials tied to a user's existing card, and Agent Checkout lets agents complete real transactions across many commerce protocols and payment providers. We're a small team, and the people who join early take real ownership.
The Role
We're hiring a founding Backend Engineer to build and operate the services, APIs, data models, and money-path logic behind Agent Wallet and Agent Checkout. You'll own that work end to end, from the schema to the authorization and mandate logic to the endpoint an agent or merchant calls, and make sure every dollar and every authorization is accounted for.
This is hands-on work. You'll design the data models, write the services, integrate payment providers and commerce protocols, and run what you ship in production. These systems move real money for real people, so correctness and reliability are the daily work, not something you get to later. You'll work directly with the founding team and have real say in the technical direction. Compensation is a competitive salary plus meaningful early equity, and we'll talk specifics during the process.
What You'll Work On
Money-path correctness
Own the guarantees that keep money movement trustworthy: idempotency keys, safe retries, exactly-once effects, webhook delivery and dedupe, and reconciliation against payment providers. When something goes wrong mid-transaction, the system should recover cleanly and the ledger should still be right.
Agent Wallet services
Build and operate the services behind programmable, scope-limited credentials tied to a user's card. You'll own the transactional state, enforce spending limits, and keep the system a reliable source of truth for every authorization and mandate we issue.
Agent Checkout integrations
Build the services that let agents complete real purchases across commerce protocols and payment providers. Present one clean interface to merchants and developers, and absorb the messy parts on our side: provider quirks, partial failures, retries, and settlement.
APIs, data models, and audit trails
Design the API contracts and schemas everything else is built on. They should be clear, hard to misuse, and safe to change over time. That includes the audit trails that let us trace every agent action back to the human who authorized it, and show after the fact exactly what was allowed and what happened.
Guardrails around agents
Build the tool interfaces, guardrails, and instrumentation that let us rely on LLMs and agents in production. You'll design the tool contracts agents call, the checks around them, and the evals and observability that catch and contain errors before they touch a transaction.
Deploying and operating what you ship
Run your services in production. Deploy them, instrument them, and keep them healthy in our AWS environment. Here infrastructure is a backend engineer's job, not a separate team standing between you and prod.
Whatever the moment needs
It's early, and responsibilities shift week to week. Expect to pick up work that falls outside any tidy list when that's what moves the product forward.
What We're Looking For
- You've built and shipped backend services or APIs that other people or systems rely on, and you've kept them running in production.
- You have strong instincts for correctness in systems that can't silently lose or double-count money: idempotency, retries, careful failure handling, and getting edge cases and distributed state right.
- You're comfortable designing data models and reasoning about consistency, transactions, and reconciliation.
- You can deploy and operate what you build on AWS or a comparable cloud, enough to own your services in production without waiting on someone else.
- You have a working sense of where LLMs and agents fail, and how to put guardrails, tooling, and instrumentation around them so failures get caught early.
- You have good judgment about scope and risk. You pick the smallest change that solves the problem and think through the downstream effects before shipping.
- You write clearly, whether it's code, comments, or a short note on what you found and what you decided.
- Payments or fintech experience helps but isn't required. We care more that you're curious and that you ship.
How to Apply
To apply, email team@getonlane.com with your resume attached, plus a short note answering the questions below.
- A system you've built and operated that you're proud of. Include a link or a short description of what it did and what you were responsible for.
- Which area above you'd most want to own, and why.
- Anything else you'd like us to know.
A resume and LinkedIn are preferred, and links to your work are welcome.
Interested?
Email your resume and a short note to team@getonlane.com. Questions about the role go to the same place.
Lane is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate every candidate on the merits of their work and the contribution they would make to the team, and we comply with all applicable federal, state, and local equal employment opportunity laws.