Senior Software Engineer, Lifecycle

The Team: 

Upstart’s Lifecycle Platform team develops innovative solutions, strategies, and systems that enable personalized, timely communication with millions of current and prospective customers. We build and scale the platforms behind preference management, email, SMS, push notifications, and emerging channels—ensuring the right message reaches the right user at the right time.

As a Software Engineer II on the team, you will be part of the broader Growth organization and partner closely with Lifecycle Marketing, Distribution, Insights, Data Platform, Analytics, and ML teams. We are the technical thought leaders and subject matter experts for outbound communications across the company. Our mission is to design and operate the infrastructure that transforms rich customer data into actionable, high-impact engagement.

This team operates with speed and ownership. We deploy frequently, unblock ourselves, and hold a high bar for accountability. We are not a siloed engineering team—we collaborate deeply with cross-functional stakeholders and play a central role in shaping the future of Upstart’s marketing platforms.

How you’ll make an impact

• Design and build scalable backend services that power our unified communications platform across SMS, email, push, and future channels.
• Develop systems for real-time, event-triggered messaging and self-serve marketing automation and experimentation capabilities.
• Translate large, complex datasets into high-leverage marketing capabilities through APIs, streaming pipelines, and reverse ETL workflows.
• Partner closely with product managers, lifecycle marketing, data insights, analytics, and data platform teams to define requirements and deliver impactful, data-driven solutions.
• Lead medium-sized projects independently—proactively identifying risks, managing ambiguity, and driving execution from design through launch.
• Strengthen our engineering culture by improving system reliability, accelerating iteration, and clearly communicating technical trade-offs to cross-functional stakeholders.

Minimum Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) + 4 years of experience
• Experience building and operating microservices and APIs in a cloud environment (preferably AWS).
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Kotlin, Java, Ruby, or Python.
• Demonstrated ability to independently execute on projects, navigate ambiguity, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional partners.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to work in a distributed team

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting Marketing, Growth, or GTM teams, particularly in environments involving CDPs, customer segmentation, or campaign orchestration.
• Experience with reverse ETL tools (e.g., Hightouch, Census), data pipeline tooling (e.g., Airbyte, Fivetran, Databricks), or marketing automation platforms (e.g.,Iterable, Braze, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
• Familiarity with real-time event streaming systems and high-throughput messaging architectures.
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs and building systems that ingest, transform, and expose large volumes of data.
• Track record of leading medium-to-large projects and contributing to system design decisions with long-term platform impact.

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote

Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones.

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.