Software Engineer

Join as an early engineer and build products to prevent financial crime.

Sandbar

Sandbar's mission is to improve the health of the global financial system by fighting money laundering and other financial crimes.

By law, financial institutions must monitor transactions for illicit activity. However, most institutions find it difficult to do so effectively. Roughly $6T is laundered every year and $180B is spent on anti-money-laundering efforts by US institutions. Despite this, less than 1% of laundered money is identified correctly. We are also seeing many systems produce false-positive rates of over 95%. Consequently, banks and the government must spend extra time and resources on extraneous investigations, taking away resources from finding criminals.

Product

To achieve our goal, we ingest and standardize millions of messy data points coming from financial institutions that may sign up for the service. Once we have standardized and ingested the data, we can run complex calculations on it, checking for suspicious behavior and building a score around the riskiness of a given profile. If anything is found, we can surface that to our clients. By providing information accessibility, building intuitive workflows, allowing for custom processing, and curating accurate data, we can reduce the false-positive rate of our calculations, and reduce the amount of work dedicated to a given investigation.

You

We are looking for engineers who are excited about building a company from the ground up. As a founding engineer at Sandbar, you'll be responsible for defining and building features in our product to enable our customers to model and detect suspicious activity on their platforms. You'll work cross-functionally, collaborating with members of the team who have expertise in the subject matter, product management, design, infrastructure and security, to solve real-world problems our customers face. You'll have a lot of autonomy and freedom. You will learn and touch almost every part of the stack; big bonus if you're comfortable being a "Swiss Army knife". As we grow, you will be able to determine your own path and build skills you want to develop by directing your career growth and specialization. You're excited by and personally interested in how AI is reshaping they way we build products and solve problems; and you want to use it for positive far-reaching, real-world impact.

Team

We’re a small, but mighty and collaborative team based in NYC focused on delivering world-class software for our clients. You will not be in NYC, but you will visit NYC every now and then. And multiple people from our NYC office will visit you more often; in-person collaboration is priceless in the early days of building an enduring business so we will do our best to continue that value with our Central and South American teammates. We've raised from some amazing investors and have a group of amazing advisors and partners who can help us build the right things. This includes 3 institutional VC funds––Lachy Groom, Abstract Ventures, and BoxGroup––and 45+ angel investors including founders, executives, and early employees of Ramp, Stripe, Plaid, Remitly, Revolut, Google, Open AI, Square, and more.

What You'll Do

• Work with a broad range of technologies and systems to own and solve problems end-to-end.
• Work closely with engineers, designers, and product managers to build new features in our product and data platform.
• Contribute to our technical vision and uphold our high engineering standards.
• Leverage new technologies like AI to continuously uplevel the quality and speed of delivery.

What You'll Need

• 5 years of relevant work experience.
• Great communication skills, and a high degree of awareness and agency.
• Track record of delivering high-quality products and features end-to-end.
• Ability to turn real-world problems and opportunities into engineering solutions.
• Desire to work in a highly collaborative environment, and to continuously grow and master your craft.
• Experience or willingness to heavily leverage new technologies like AI in your code and the product itself.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Pulumi, or similar technologies.
• Knowledge of SQL and experience with Postgres.
• Experience with Flink, Iceberg, or similar technologies.
• Experience working in a large Java codebase.
• Experience with Python, a growing part of our codebase.
• Experience with Typescript, Next.js, React, and MUI.
• Experience using AI-based development tools like Cursor, etc.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO, with encouraged time off.
• Commuter benefits.
• Access to an office if you want to go in.
• Free lunches everyday.

Sandbar celebrates diversity and welcomes applications from all backgrounds. Additionally, we value potential and growth, so even if you don’t feel that you fulfill all of the criteria, you should still feel comfortable applying, and your application will be considered fairly.