Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who actually make and participate in that culture. Substack’s model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing. It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences.
About the Payments Team
Subscription payments are the heart of Substack’s product and business model. Everything we do is based on the idea that creators can and should be paid directly by their audience, instead of relying on attention capture and advertising. And we believe that creators themselves should own these payment relationships, without being tied to any platform, including ours.
We are a small team with outsized impact and ownership. We take on both the traditional payments engineering : integrating with payment processors, managing the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription revenue, and also the full stack feature development that drives those payments. This means a wide variety of projects, including building brand new payout systems, A/B testing the subscribe flow, and shipping features like gift subscriptions.
Responsibilities
Develop the core payment surfaces and backend systems on Substack.
Own your work and deliver high-quality solutions from product concept and proposal to implementation, experimentation, and measurement.
We work with TypeScript, especially Node/Express and React, and Postgres. It’s helpful if you know these technologies already; if not, we’ll be excited to help you learn.
We also work with payment processors, including Stripe. Again, experience here is beneficial but not required.
Requirements
3+ years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping web applications.
Independent and autonomous. Strong product sense and intuition.
Passionate about building a better business model for the internet.
Substack's compensation package includes a market competitive salary, equity for all full time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $140,000 - $260,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.
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