Elayne

Estate settlement, from verified discovery to distribution

About The Role

We're looking for a Head of Engineering to be the technical owner of Elayne. You'll own end-to-end technical decisions across architecture, backend, data, infrastructure, and security, ship the highest-stakes systems personally, and set the standards the engineering team is built on.

You'll work directly with the founding team and CEO, with a clear line of sight to CTO. Meaningful equity comes with the role.

The problem

When someone passes, their family inherits a second job: legal, financial, and institutional records scattered across dozens of systems that were never built to talk to each other, half of which still want a mailed document or fax. We turn that chaos into a single organized estate a family can actually navigate.

Doing that means proving who has authority, pulling verified data from institutions that guard it, and producing records a court will accept. The hard part isn't the model. It's authorization, credentialed access, and complex logic that has to be right every time. We're one of a small handful of companies with a direct integration into the IRS, alongside credentialed access to credit bureaus, government registries, and financial institutions. Access like that is earned through architecture: authority gating, auditability, and data handling that hold up under real scrutiny. That architecture is what you'll own.

What we produce gets filed with courts and lands in the hands of grieving families. A wrong value isn't a bug ticket, it's a rejected petition and weeks of delay. Data integrity here isn't a QA step: every value traceable to its source, every record defensible in court.

If you've been craving problems with real human impact instead of another B2B SaaS or CRM tool, this is it.

What you'll build

• The family estate record: one source of truth for a family's financial life, with permission-scoped views for families, attorneys, and ops
• The multi-tenant authorization layer: who-can-see-what enforced in architecture, not convention
• Credentialed integrations, starting with the IRS and expanding across credit bureaus, government systems, and financial institutions: third-party API work, credential lifecycle management, reconciliation, and webhook failure modes, a permanent part of the job and where revenue flows
• The security posture in substance: PII encryption, audit logging, access controls, and incident response
• The engineering standards and the team: set expectations for quality and ownership, and recruit and evaluate the engineers who build alongside you

What we're looking for

• A builder first: your output is code and shipped systems, and that doesn't change with the title
• You've owned production systems handling regulated or sensitive data (fintech, identity, health, credentialing) and can explain the architecture decisions that made them defensible
• You've shipped where being wrong had real costs: money moved, records filed, identities verified
• Integration appetite: vendor sandboxes, credential chains, and reconciliation queues are satisfying work to you, not beneath you
• Accountability: you've held the final call before and owned the outcome, good or bad
• High-conviction, low-ego: you'd rather find what's right than win the argument

How we work

We are a small, high-trust team. We care deeply about the people we serve, move quickly, communicate directly, and hold a high bar for the quality of the experience we deliver.

The work here is highly collaborative. The best ideas often come from being close to the details: a family conversation, a product gap, an operational edge case, or a partner need. We expect people to take ownership of outcomes, pull in the right teammates, and turn what they learn into better systems for everyone.

Location and expectations

This is a full-time role based in New York City (NoMad) with the rest of the team. This is high-ownership work, and we're upfront that families and courts don't always operate on business hours.

Additional benefits: Medical, dental, and vision insurance.

Equal opportunity

Elayne is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants based on ability, experience, and potential, and do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic under applicable federal, state, or local laws.

1. Intro call: motivation, experience, mutual fit
2. Technical interview: oriented towards practical problem-solving
3. Systems design
4. Take-home: a short, scoped realistic problem
5. Final conversations