What we're looking for
We need an engineer with 3+ years of experience (roughly 3–10 years is ideal; up to about 15 years for someone coming from a larger company) building production systems, mostly on the backend. You should have a track record of taking projects from a blank page to finished delivery at an early- or mid-stage startup (Series B or earlier). You should be comfortable owning several domains at once with little structure. That means turning user pain points into requirements and a ticket backlog without being told what to do, and writing code with AI agent tools every day. Bonus points if you have applied AI experience (agent harnesses, eval and annotation loops, MCP), a strong security mindset, deep Postgres or DevOps skills, or a fintech background (for example Stripe, Plaid, Mercury, Anchorage, Ramp or Carta).
About Sava
Sava (YC) is a Nevada-chartered trust company that took nine months to get its charter. It has rebuilt trust administration from scratch for the AI era, and its platform is live and serving customers. Sava raised a $10M seed from Gradient Ventures, Max Mullen (Instacart founder), SV Angel and others. Its founders, Nimit Maru (2x YC founder who sold two companies to public companies) and Rush Sadiwala (serial founder with deep financial and operational experience), have both had successful exits. More than 300 founders in the YC network have already asked about opening trusts.
What you'll do
- Design and build agent-driven workflows for fiduciary work. This includes monitoring incoming transactions, proposing distributions, document extraction and versioning, compliance monitoring (OFAC, KYC/AML) and required beneficiary notices.
- Own the full agentic eval and annotation loop. Build on the existing golden test sets and add repeatable evaluation hooks, agent harness improvements and LLM evals in CI/CD.
- Extend the fiduciary ledger. It handles income and principal accounting on top of standard double-entry accounting and must cover complex events such as splits, mergers and corporate accounts. Correctness is enforced at the database and API layers.
- Work closely with the trust officer and both founders. Sit in on onboarding calls, learn the pain points, and turn them into product requirements and a working backlog.
- Build integrations with vendors and financial systems, including payment rails (such as Stripe for ACH), compliance providers and custodians. Choose to buy or build based on correctness and security.
- Design security-first infrastructure: self-hosted auth, envelope encryption for sensitive data, full audit logs, and observability through Honeycomb and PostHog.
- Build frontend work on the existing design system and component library. The goal is to make complex trust and legal structures simple to understand.
- Lead projects from the first design to production and help shape an architecture the company will run on for years.
Tech stack
PostgreSQL with heavy use of database constraints and checks, Go on the backend, and React/TypeScript on the frontend. All code is generated from SQL scripts to Go types to frontend contracts, with no ORM and no hand-written SQL. The stack also includes full CI/CD, Honeycomb, PostHog and an MCP server. Experience with Go or React is not required, but solid relational database and Postgres skills are very important.
Compensation and logistics
Full-time and on-site in New York City 5 days a week. Competitive base salary with some flexibility for exceptional candidates, plus competitive equity (4-year vest, 1-year cliff). No bonus structure right now. No visa sponsorship and no relocation support.
Red flags
A pattern of short stints (3–6 months) at many companies; about one year per company is the minimum. Profiles that only take assigned tickets. Candidates who don't use AI coding tools.