Team Lead - Lead Software Engineer

About Scratch

Scratch Financial (“Scratch”) is a Series C financial technology startup based in Los Angeles, California. Our goal is to make difficult financial decisions simple and increase accessibility to fair, affordable, and transparent medical financing. Driven by our award-winning technology, Scratch has become the fastest growing financing provider in veterinary care, with a partner network of 15,000+ practices across the U.S. and Canada–ranging from dental offices to optometry clinics.

Scratch Has 2 Main Products

• Scratch Pay: Point-of-sale lending, including a BNPL offering and longer-term payment plans
• Scratch Checkout: Payment processing that is integrated with the veterinary practice management software

Position Overview

We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our integrations team. The ideal candidate will be well experienced in new product development and has a passion for creating new and innovative products and solutions that meet the client’s needs. The ideal candidate will also be someone that is innovative, open to change and strives to deliver high quality code in collaboration with their team. You will be responsible for leading the integrations team, designing and developing front end and back end web architecture, testing your solutions, and ensuring its ongoing responsiveness.

What You'll Do

• Work with the rest of the team, Scrum Masters and Product Owners to define the vision and processes for the team. Note that the mission is defined at the business level, e.g. PIMS Integrations has a mission to develop integrations with veterinary PIMS software, but how they achieve that is up to the team to decide.
• Flag issues that may prevent projects from being successfully completed in the planned time frame, and work with Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Director of Engineering to try to resolve them.
• Plan and manage the execution of tech related issues in Jira. This could include things like technical debt or under-the-hood improvements that are not part of any direct customer need.
• Lead technical solution finding and write any documentation that is necessary to clarify service architecture and design.
• Take ownership of production issues in their domain, jumping in to help diagnose, coordinate fixes, and contribute to post-mortem discussions.
• Participate in any broader company meetings where it’s necessary to provide updates on the team status, as well as surface any blockers, and work with the other team leads to solve these blockers.
• Coordinate with the Director of Engineering in case more resources are needed for the project, either human resources or tools.
• Conduct regular 1-1 meetings with team members to maintain the team’s integrity, set individual goals, help team members that may be struggling, detect potential issues early on and share any concerns with the Director of engineering, as early as possible, so help can be arranged.
• Share feedback directed at team members as diligently as possible, so everyone knows when they’re doing something right or wrong.
• Keep up to date on any knowledge that is required to fulfill the role, either technical or managerial in nature.

What We're Looking For

• Availability: 6am - 1pm PST / 2PM - 9PM UTC for team meetings

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years focused on building and maintaining production-grade Chrome Extensions (Manifest v2/v3).

• 3+ years of experience building ElectronJS applications

• 3+ years of experience managing software engineering teams, including:

• Mentoring engineers and conducting performance reviews.

• Leading technical decision-making and architectural discussions.

• Collaborating with product managers and stakeholders to align engineering with business goals.

• 3+ years of hands-on backend development with Node.js + TypeScript, including API design, authentication, and cloud integrations.

• 2+ years of experience with modern frontend frameworks (Vue.js preferred, or React/Angular with willingness to learn Vue).

• Proven experience with Google Cloud Functions (GCF) or similar serverless architectures (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions).

• Strong knowledge of NoSQLDatabase (such as Firestore).

• Strong knowledge of SQLDatabase (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL).

• Experience with microservice based architecture.

• Strong coding skills, ability to use BDD and TDD where needed.

• Experience and confidence developing RESTful APIs and High-load apps.

• Proficiency with fundamental front end languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

• Deep experience with puppeteer (playwright, selenium etc) and browser automations/data extraction

• Ability to switch between languages and frameworks, not vendor-locked-in.

• Familiarity with Agile and Scrum processes.

• Fluent in English.

• Ability to design, write and test code, algorithms, whether in the front-end, back-end, you-name-it (Cloud Functions).

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with veterinary management systems is a strong plus.
• Knowledge of C#, Google Cloud, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and Docker.
• Experience in building payment processing solutions.
• Experience in loans business.
• Experience in Data warehouse solutions like BigQuery
• Good eye for design and front end skills.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining QA/automations frameworks for the browser extension

Why You'll Love Working Here

• Competitive base salary ranging from $100k - $250k (location and experience dependent)

Scratch is a remote-first company, giving ultimate flexibility to today's nomadic work style. For those who prefer a hybrid model, we do have an office space in Pasadena available for use (which is stocked with snacks & various beverages). We offer unlimited PTO, covered healthcare, 401k match, cell plan reimbursement, and monthly recognition opportunities. We also provide learning platforms and resources for all to keep growing. Not only that, but we have an equity retention policy to ensure you grow as the company grows financially, as well. And if your family is growing, we offer generous parental leave, too!

How to Apply

Ready to join our team? To apply, please visit our Scratch Careers Page. Be sure to:

• Submit your resume.
• Answer the custom questions provided.
• Feel free to add any additional information or documents you believe are relevant to your application.

We look forward to reviewing your application!

• Our team will ONLY contact you from the domain @scratchpay.com or @ats.rippling.com

Scratch is committed to diversity in its workforce and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Scratch considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.