Company Description

Portola is building the infrastructure layer that connects bank and fintech lenders to the next generation of borrower platforms — neobanks, crypto wallets, and embedded finance providers. Our product, Passage, is a loan origination and distribution protocol with over a million monthly active users. We're replacing the post-origination capital markets stack with programmable rails: schema-first APIs, automated document exchange, and real-time loan lifecycle management.

Role Description

This is a full-time, on-site role for a Founding Backend Engineer based in San Francisco, CA. You'll be working directly with the founder in a monorepo codebase that powers the core API, SDK generation pipeline, secure document exchange, and integrations with lenders and neobanks. This is a high-ownership role — you'll ship features end-to-end, from schema design to deployment, with real money moving through the system from day one.

What You'll Work With

• TypeScript across the entire stack — backend, SDK generation, tooling

• Express and Fastify for API services

• Prisma + PostgreSQL for data modeling and persistence

• Redis + Bull for caching and job queues

• Zod schemas as the source of truth, generating OpenAPI specs and typed SDKs automatically

• AWS S3 for encrypted document storage

• OpenTelemetry for observability

• Docker Compose for local infrastructure

• Turborepo monorepo with npm workspaces

• Next.js + React + Tailwind for internal dashboards and portals

• Jest for unit, integration, and end-to-end testing

What We're Looking For

• Strong TypeScript — not "I've used it," but you think in types. You understand generics, discriminated unions, and Zod's inference system.

• Experience designing and building APIs that external developers consume. You've thought about schema design, versioning, error contracts, and SDK ergonomics.

• Comfort with PostgreSQL and Prisma (or similar ORMs). You can write migrations, think about indexing, and reason about data modeling for financial systems.

• You've worked with queues, caching layers, and async job processing in production.

• You can read a monorepo, trace a request across packages, and understand how generated code fits into the system.

• You write tests. Unit tests, integration tests against real databases, and end-to-end flows. Not as an afterthought.

• You've shipped production systems where correctness matters — fintech, payments, healthcare, anything where bugs cost real money.

Nice to Have

• Experience with OpenAPI spec generation or SDK codegen pipelines

• Familiarity with cryptographic signing, JWTs, and API key authentication schemes

• Exposure to crypto/blockchain concepts (ethers.js, stablecoins, on-chain settlement)

• You've touched Next.js and can build internal tooling when needed

• Experience with observability (OpenTelemetry, structured logging with Pino)

What This Isn't

This isn't a role where you'll be handed Jira tickets and asked to implement specs. You'll be in the room when we decide what to build. You'll have opinions about architecture and the authority to act on them. If you want a founding engineer title that actually means something, this is it.