Software Engineer, Foundations

Remote (ET & CT time zones only; some travel required)

About Us

Clasp is a venture-backed, mission-driven startup transforming access to education and career pathways. We are revolutionizing the way employers attract and retain critical talent and the way colleges and universities support their students through education financing, all while tackling the student debt crisis. (Yep, we think BIG.) We like to think of ourselves as more than a fintech; we're a catalyst for economic mobility.

A Forbes Fintech 50 company, portfolio company of SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management, the largest HR organization out there) and recipient of "Startup of the Year" by StartUp Boston, Clasp is driven by our commitment to social impact and innovation.

Our work spans two business lines:

Clasp Talent helps healthcare employers attract and retain critical talent by connecting them with diverse candidates and using student loan repayment as a powerful recruiting and retention tool. We meaningfully connect employers, educational institutions, and learners to drive mutual benefit.

Clasp Finance equips colleges and universities with lending technology to launch and operate their own private student loan programs, enabling schools to step in and support their students directly with financial aid.

Join us on our journey to give power to learners and unlock fulfilling careers that drive positive change in their communities and beyond.

Who We Need

We're looking for a Software Engineer to join the Foundations team in Clasp Talent. Foundations owns the core services and infrastructure that every Talent domain team builds on: user management and SSO, notifications, data exchange with employers, schools, and partners, and the shared platform patterns underneath them.

You will report to the Tech Lead, Foundations for day-to-day operations and work directly with teammates, product partners, and engineers on other domain teams. You'll own pieces of shared services from design through production, and grow into owning larger systems. You use AI tools deliberately to move faster, you care about clean APIs and reliable systems, and you ask good questions when the path is unclear.

At Clasp we run a DevOps culture where engineers have full ownership of the code they write and the infrastructure it runs on. We want someone who is excited to build things other engineers depend on, and to grow quickly alongside us.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain features in Talent's shared services, including user management, authentication and SSO, role-based access control, and notification systems (email, in-app, and other channels).

• Implement and maintain data exchange integrations and APIs with employers, schools, and partner systems, with clear contracts, error handling, and monitoring.

• Write reusable services, libraries, and documentation that other engineering teams can adopt with minimal friction, and respond to their feedback and questions.

• Write clean, tested, maintainable code across the front end and back end, and take part in code reviews and technical design discussions.

• Apply AI-assisted development techniques (code generation, test writing, refactoring, documentation) to ship higher-quality software faster.

• Work with Product, QA, Security, and Compliance to turn requirements for identity, access, and data handling into working software.

• Improve CI/CD pipelines, test coverage, and observability for the services Foundations owns, and take part in the on-call rotation.

• Contribute to a culture of continuous learning, high standards, and direct, low-ego feedback.

What You'll Need

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally at a SaaS startup or similar environment, with experience owning features end to end.

• Strong fluency in Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI, or similar) and TypeScript/JavaScript (React, Next.js), with working knowledge of PostgreSQL.

• Experience building and consuming APIs, and an understanding of authentication and authorization basics (sessions, tokens, OAuth, role-based permissions).

• Experience with CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar) and cloud infrastructure (AWS or Google Cloud), and comfort debugging in production with logs and monitoring.

• AI-native in your workflow: you use coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc.) as a real force multiplier, not just for autocomplete.

• Strong written and verbal communication, i