Software Engineer - Benefits

About Central

What is Central?

Central kills back-office work for startups.

While HR / payroll platforms give you software to figure it out, Central actually does all the work using AI agents and human experts : payroll, benefits, compliance, accounting, taxes, and more.

That's 10+ hours back every month. Thousands of founders trust Central, including high-growth companies like Magic Patterns, Wordware, and Bitesight.

Learn more and start for free at centralhq.com .

Why Central?

Founders start companies to solve problems and build something that matters. Not to become HR managers.

Yet here we are in 2025. Despite countless $10B+ 'solutions', founders are still drowning in back-office bullshit.

Why? Because every platform was built for HR professionals, not founders.

Today, every founder still has to : Register in multiple states. Set up workers' comp. Categorize expenses. Decipher government letters. Pay invoices. Update addresses. Manage equity. Troubleshoot insurance. Answer PTO questions. The list never ends.

What a waste of time. But what's worse is the constant anxiety : What am I missing? Did I do this right? Will I get fined?

What founders need isn't another tool they have to learn and manage, but something that actually does the work. All of it.

As a founding member, you'll have a seat at the table and help Central scale to serve thousands of companies and founders.

Our culture

Central is a high-performance sports team with an extremely high bar and 3 core values :

Think clearly

Show high agency

Craft magic

What you’ll do

Architect mission-critical workflows : Design, build, and maintain stateful, end-to-end systems that ensure data integrity (idempotency, reconciliation, audit trails) and meet stringent compliance and reliability requirements.

Iterate rapidly : Ship incremental, production-ready features in days—prototype, gather real user feedback, and refine relentlessly.

Own your domain : Act as the technical product lead for core platform areas—setting standards for code quality, observability, testing, and operational excellence.

Delight and empower customers : Partner with Product and Support to translate user pain points into clean, intuitive solutions that scale from a single startup to enterprise.

Push the limits with AI : AI is part of the DNA at Central. We believe we can leverage it in a variety of ways to automate things that were previously impossible and create completely new user experiences.

Who you are

Experienced systems architect : You’ve designed and delivered large-scale, stateful architectures—modeling complex domains, defining clear data schemas, and ensuring end-to-end reliability.

Distributed-transaction specialist : You’ve implemented robust patterns for coordinating multi-step workflows across disparate services and third-party APIs—handling two-phase commits, sagas, idempotency, and compensating actions to keep data consistent.

Deep transactional-pipeline expertise : Comfort building reconciled workflows with audit trails and automated recovery, especially when orchestrating financial or compliance-related operations.

Reliability-first mindset : You bake in observability (metrics, logs, alerts), fault tolerance, and graceful degradation from day one.

Scalability & performance focus : You understand caching, queueing, rate-limiting, and have tuned systems to handle rapid growth without sacrificing latency or correctness.

Strategic thinker & communicator : You break down complex trade-offs into clear plans, document your designs, and keep cross-functional stakeholders aligned.

Bias toward action & high standards : You ship prototypes quickly, iterate based on real feedback, and insist on production-ready quality in every release.

What we offer

Competitive salary and equity

Comprehensive benefits : Medical, dental, vision, 401k (US employees only)

Unlimited PTO and sick leave

Remote work

2-4 off-sites per year

Note for US Roles : We do not provide visa sponsorship. You must be authorized to work in the U.S.