Product Engineers (NYC)

We are Heron, a Series A company based in New York and London. Come help us end the underwriting tax.

• The problem is big and still largely unsolved. Every time a small business applies for a loan, advance, or insurance policy, people still spend hours manually reading documents, checking businesses, detecting fraud, and deciding what to offer. Small businesses pay for that friction through slower decisions, worse economics, and products that are too expensive to exist. When underwriting gets dramatically easier, financial products get better and cheaper.
• We are building the software to automate it. Heron handles the work from intake and bank statement scrubbing through background checks, cashflow analysis, fraud detection, and decisioning, all inside the systems our customers already use. We analyze 60K submissions a day across 200+ funders, brokers, and fintechs, covering roughly 15% of US businesses seeking capital.
• Your work reaches real customers, fast. Underwriters use Heron every day to make real financial decisions. Engineers ship to production in their first week, and you will usually know exactly who your work helped because you will probably have talked to them. What you ship this week can change how a funder operates next week.
• You will own problems, not tickets. We hire pilots, not passengers. Nobody waits around to be told what to do. You spot the problem, understand it deeply, own the outcome, and ship the solution. At ~60 people, there are very few layers between you and the impact of your work.
• We move fast because we get close to the problem. We fly to Gainesville to sit beside customers and watch them work. We label transactions by hand before automating them. We will build the website by tomorrow when that is the fastest way to learn. Speed here does not mean cutting corners. It means understanding the problem well enough to move decisively. And we are radically candid with each other because the best teams give feedback continuously, directly, and with care.
• This is an unusually early moment in a very large market. Small business underwriting remains deeply manual, leaving a huge amount of open ground. Customers keep pulling us into new workflows and new problems faster than we can build for them, so we raised a $16M Series A from Insight Partners, alongside Y Combinator, to keep going. Joining now means you are not inheriting a finished playbook. You are helping write it.
• We work together in person. Our teams are based in NYC and London, with travel between the two offices. We offer top-of-the-line equipment, competitive compensation and equity, healthcare, 401(k), fertility benefits, and take-what-you-need vacation. We have weekly team lunches, always inclusive. Applicants from every background are welcome, and we have zero tolerance for discrimination.

Read more about our mission at herondata.io/mission.

We are seeking high-performing NYC-based engineers of any level to help us solve more of our customers’ problems. We are looking for folks who are excited about designing elegant technical solutions and shipping great code frequently. If you are looking for a fresh challenge at a fast-growing AI startup - we would love to hear from you!

This is a hands-on (‘individual contributor’) role focused on building product that will solve our customers’ problems, including specifically:

• Designing, building and maintaining backend services and APIs
• Designing and building new UI/web components
• Developing new integrations to third party services and AI models
• Help triage bugs, investigate production incidents, and contribute to postmortems and root cause analysis
• Participating in code reviews, collaborating across technical and non-technical teams and stakeholders

Our ideal hire will:

• Enjoy -actually- building and making an impact: you get a kick out of shipping code frequently, iteratively, and collaboratively. You value MVPs and customer impact over perfectly engineered systems. You can take responsibility over the end-to-end deployment of what you build.
• Thrive at solving tough technical problems: you enjoy breaking down challenges into simple and well-designed solutions. You are fact-oriented and thoughtful in your approach, but you don’t get bogged down in over-intellectualizing or over-complicating things.
• Scale-oriented: while having a bias to action and impact, you will care about scalable infrastructure and engineering processes. Even better if you’re able to bring some better practices or improvements to our infrastructure or ways of working!
• Be able to contribute in our stack: we try to balance speed and impact with fitting the best framework/ technology to the task at hand. Currently, we work primarily in Python / Flask / FastAPI on the backend, Terraform / GCP / AWS for infra, and React / JavaScript / TypeScript / Vercel on the frontend. Ideally, you’ll be able to contribute within our stack while also helping us experiment and evolve to continually improve functionality and performance.

Above all else, we value people who want to make an impact in their work. Here are some of the behaviors that we expect of all Herons:

• Scrappy and creative: when faced with an obstacle, you will either overcome it by pure determination (i.e., by hand), or find an unconventional approach or ‘hack’ to navigate it.
• Persistent: you may not always find the right answer or person immediately, but you're motivated to keep on trying until you do so. You’ll go the extra mile - including Flying to Gainesville - if that’s what it takes.
• Pilot not passenger: at a fast-growing company like Heron we need people who jump on opportunities unprompted and drive them to a great outcome, rather than folks who wait to be told what to do.
• Excited to work in a fast-paced, high-growth, team-based environment: we aim to move quickly and decisively, but together. You’ll be a great team player and do what it takes for the team to succeed.

• Competitive compensation, including equity
• Based full-time in NYC, where the team works in-person
• Your choice of top-of-the-line equipment to fit out your desk in the office
• Occasional travel to London for retreats and to work with the team there
• Competitive benefits: health insurance; pension; uncapped annual leave; parental leave
• Free mental health support via Spill - on-demand access to therapy
• Weekly company lunches (always inclusive and vegan-friendly - especially if you like Korean or Vietnamese food!)
• Applicants from any background and gender are welcome and we have a zero tolerance policy on discrimination

• Customer dashboard -- NextJS, using React, TypeScript, deployed on Vercel
• Backend application -- Python (Flask or FastAPI)
• Backend infra -- Celery / RabbitMQ, Postgresql, Kubernetes. Heavy data processing typically done async
• Inference -- in-house LLMs and external LLM providers
• GitHub for repos & GitHub actions for CI/CD

• Initial conversation (20 minutes) - conversation to discuss what you're looking for, what Heron offers, and to see if there's a good fit.
• Technical interview (up to 60 minutes) - interactive technical session with one or two of our engineers where you will review a pull request and then do some live coding to build on it.
• Team interviews (2-3 hours in total) - mix of technical and behavioral conversations with Heron teammates and founders. You'll get a feel for the people you'll work with and how we approach problems, and we'll get to know how you collaborate, communicate, and think.
• References - 2 references from people you've worked with who can speak to your impact, working style, and contributions in a professional setting.