Software Engineer - Payroll
About Central
What is Central?
Central eliminates 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 an early 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
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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.