Company Overview
Directed IRA is the fastest-growing, highest-rated self-directed IRA custodian in the U.S. Our 25,000+ clients trust us with $3+ billion in assets under custody, and we have been recognized by Inc. 5000 for 3 years in a row for our explosive growth.
Founded by attorney, author, and content creator Mat Sorensen, Directed IRA blends financial education with high-integrity custodial services. Our industry-leading team helps everyday investors take control of retirement through alternative investments in real estate, startups, crypto, private placements, and more.
Why You’ll Love Working Here
Our culture is built around teamwork, industry leadership, and celebration. With over 1,200 verified 5-star Google reviews and recurring internal events, including monthly lunches, team outings, and incentives, our team environment is fast-paced, mission-driven, and focused on helping clients succeed.
About the Role
We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to help improve, scale, and secure the technology platform supporting Directed IRA’s self-directed IRA customers and internal operations.
This is a high-ownership backend role for someone who is comfortable working in an existing production system, improving architecture over time, and raising the quality bar across the engineering team. You will work on backend services, platform security, third-party integrations, data synchronization, and core system reliability.
This is not a narrow ticket-taking role. We are looking for someone who can understand business requirements, make sound technical decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and take responsibility for the quality of what ships.
In This Role, You Will
- Own and improve backend systems for a financial technology platform serving self-directed IRA customers.
- Work on a NestJS, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL stack supporting customer-facing workflows, internal operations, and third-party integrations.
- Lead security and access control improvements, including authorization, data isolation, PII handling, and secure engineering practices.
- Build, maintain, and improve integrations with third-party systems such as Cheetah, HubSpot, Stripe, HelloSign, and other business-critical platforms.
- Help design and operate reliable data synchronization workflows between internal systems and external platforms.
- Use AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully to accelerate backend development, improve code comprehension, generate tests, support debugging, and reduce repetitive engineering work.
- Help establish practical AI-assisted engineering workflows that improve team productivity without lowering standards for correctness, security, review, or maintainability.
- Review code with an emphasis on correctness, maintainability, security, and long-term system quality.
- Mentor other engineers and help establish stronger backend engineering standards.
- Participate in architecture discussions and help guide technical direction for the platform.
- Work directly with engineering leadership and executives to explain technical decisions, risks, and tradeoffs.
We’re Looking for Someone With
- 6+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
- Strong experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
- NestJS experience strongly preferred.
- Strong PostgreSQL experience, including schema design, query performance, and production data modeling.
- Experience building or maintaining security-sensitive systems involving access control, data isolation, auditability, or PII.
- Experience with third-party API integrations, webhooks, background jobs, and data synchronization pipelines.
- Practical experience using AI-assisted development tools as part of a professional engineering workflow.
- Strong judgment around where AI tools help, where they introduce risk, and how to validate AI-assisted work before it reaches production.
- Strong debugging and production troubleshooting skills.
- A clear ownership mindset: you care about the system, not just the ticket.
- Good judgment when balancing speed, quality, security, and maintainability.
- Comfort working in an existing codebase that is actively being improved.
- Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred Skills and Experience
- Experience in financial technology, retirement services, banking, lending, payments, or another regulated industry.
- Experience with SOC 2, compliance-driven engineering, audit logging, or formal security remediation.
- Experience with HubSpot, Stripe, Dropbox, Cheetah, QuickBooks, or similar third-party platforms.
- Experience designing data synchronization workflows across multiple systems of record.
- Experience with observability tools, structured logging, metrics, tracing, and production alerting.
- Experience improving legacy or inherited systems without stopping business-critical delivery.
- Familiarity with AWS, CI/CD workflows, Docker, and modern DevOps practices.
How We Work
We value engineers who take ownership of outcomes, not just assigned tickets. The right person for this role will be comfortable asking clarifying questions, identifying risks early, documenting important technical decisions, and following through until the work is stable in production.
We are actively improving the platform, engineering process, and quality standards. That means we care about small, reviewable pull requests, thoughtful code review, meaningful testing, clear technical design, and pragmatic documentation. We do not treat code review as a formality; it is an important part of how we protect customers, improve maintainability, and raise the quality of the system over time.
We expect engineers to use modern tools, including AI-assisted development tools, to improve productivity, code comprehension, testing, documentation, and debugging. At the same time, AI-generated or AI-assisted work is held to the same standards as any other engineering work. Engineers are responsible for understanding what they ship, validating behavior, considering security and edge cases, and producing code that can be reviewed, maintained, and operated in production.
We move quickly, but we do not optimize for speed at the expense of correctness, security, or long-term maintainability. Engineers are expected to think through edge cases, understand the impact of their changes, and communicate clearly when tradeoffs need to be made.
This is an environment where strong backend judgment matters. You should be comfortable working in a production codebase that has real customers, real business constraints, and areas that need improvement. We are looking for someone who can help make the system better while continuing to deliver meaningful work.
What Success Looks Like
- Backend changes are designed thoughtfully, tested appropriately, and shipped with fewer regressions.
- Security and access control issues are identified, prioritized, and remediated systematically.
- Integrations become more reliable, observable, and easier to maintain.
- Code review becomes a meaningful quality gate, not a rubber-stamp process.
- Technical decisions are documented clearly enough for the broader team to understand.
- The engineering team has higher confidence in the backend systems supporting the business.
- Executives and stakeholders have clear visibility into technical risks, tradeoffs, and progress.
Why Join the Directed IRA Team?
- Schedule flexibility
- Fun company incentives and prizes
- Opportunity to work on a fast-growing financial technology platform
- High-impact role with direct visibility into technical strategy and company growth
Additional Requirements
Hired employees are subject to a background check.
Pay: $150,000.00 - $185,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Vision insurance
Work Location: Remote
