Staff Engineer, User Trust

About Betterment

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease. We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays).

About the Role

On User Trust, you’ll build the systems and experiences that help users, partners, and regulators trust Betterment’s platform. You’ll work on critical capabilities spanning, user privacy and compliance, account access, KYC, risk scoring, login and account recovery, and fraud prevention.

This role sits at the intersection of security, legal & compliance, risk, and product engineering to deliver scalable, reliable solutions that protect customers, reduce fraud, and support Betterment’s regulatory obligations.

As a staff engineer, you’ll play an instrumental role in designing and implementing complex systems within the team’s domain, guiding your team’s full stack development practices and collaborating with other senior engineering leaders to advance Betterment’s technology and create high performance, reliability and exceptional developer experience.

This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees.

• New York City: $200,000 - $238,000

This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience designing, building, and operating systems for fraud detection, prevention, or risk mitigation in high-trust environments.
• Familiarity with building customer-facing and internal tools that require strong reliability, auditability, and thoughtful handling of risk.
• Exposure to domains involving identity, access, privacy, compliance, financial workflows, or other trust-critical user experiences.
• Track record of balancing user experience, business goals, and control frameworks when building scalable fullstack systems.
• Have proven and recent experience scoping, building, and leading technical projects (and the teams building them) from discovery through release
• Have experience in at least one server-side language - Ruby, Java, C#, C++, Python. (we use Ruby on Rails)
• Have experience building interactive web applications using modern Javascript frameworks (we use React)
• Have a strong understanding o