Software Engineer

About Check Payroll is broken. It's still running on decades-old infrastructure. We're rebuilding it.

We don't run payroll ourselves — we power the businesses that do. As the inventors of embedded payroll, we're redefining how people get paid and making it easier for those businesses to launch, grow, and thrive.

On our team, you'll use creative problem-solving, critical thinking, and grit to simplify the complexity of payroll for thousands of employers of every size, across all industries. We ignore conventional role boundaries in favor of the unique strengths and values each builder brings to our mission: make paying people simple. Check out our origin story!

Check is far more than just API infrastructure. We’re a springboard for building and scaling payroll businesses. See how it works for our partners.

Engineering Culture at Check Engineering at Check works as one small team with a lot of ownership. We staff engineers on business priorities rather than fixed domains, and when something is stuck, people step in to move it forward instead of waiting on ownership boundaries. AI is central to how we build, and very little of our code is written by hand. That makes engineering judgment more important: deciding which problem to solve, defining what "done" means, and catching what the AI got wrong. A merged PR isn't the finish line. The work is done when it has had the intended impact.

About this role As a Software Engineer early in your career, you'll ship real work on the platform that moves money, calculates taxes and runs compliance for thousands of businesses. You'll learn a complex, regulated domain quickly and build the judgment to turn messy real-world problems into software that partners and operators rely on.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship software that improves how partners, operators and internal teams run payroll on Check

• Use AI to learn unfamiliar systems quickly, explore approaches, and write and test code

• Own everything you ship, however it was written, so you can explain it, review it critically and debug it in production

• Define the impact you're aiming for before you start, then release early, iterate and follow through until you reach it

• Work directly with engineers, product and operations to understand problems from the people who have them

• Share what you learn so the team gets better at building with AI

• Take feedback and mentorship well, and keep raising your own quality bar

What We're Looking For

• High agency and curiosity, with a habit of running at problems and picking up context quickly

• Strong engineering fundamentals, so you can reason about systems and tradeoffs without an AI tool doing that thinking for you

• Hands-on experience building with AI tools, and the judgment to tell plausible output from correct output

• More interest in whether something worked than in how much code you wrote

• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical teammates

• Something you've built and are proud of, whether at work, in school or on your own

We don't require any particular programming language. You'll pick up our stack (Python/Django, React, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, Postgres, Temporal, GitHub) as you go.

Location This role requires a minimum of 2 days/week in-office, based in either NYC or SF.

What we offer For full-time employees, Check offers company-sponsored medical, dental, vision, short-term/long-term disability, and basic life insurance coverage, effective on their first day of work. We also provide stock options, flexible PTO and sick leave, up to 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for new parents, flexible return-to-work, 9 annual holidays, a 401k retirement plan, and a $100 monthly stipend for home internet and mobile phone expenses.

Travel & Office Policy The Check team is distributed across the US. Roles can be remote, hybrid, or based in one of our offices in New York City or San Francisco. We offer ample opportunities and encourage employees to attend team offsites, events, and hackathons throughout year. All Checketeers gather in the spring for our annual 3-day company retreat. For our in-office and hybrid employees, our offices are open all week. We provide meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays and there are regular happy hours, game nights, and other in-person events. Remote work at Check requires the ability to perform all responsibilities without distraction or disruption, while maintaining quality, effective communication, and productivity.

Check is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, provided they are consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Check is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. Check participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information from all new employees to confirm that they are authorized to work in the U.S. Check does not use E-Verify to pre-screen applicants.