Payments / Infrastructure Engineer

Pathfinder is building the financial rails for $1.5T of US education funds, a consumer card, powered by an AI eligibility model, that gives parents instant access to their education dollars (think "HSA card, but for education") while giving states automated AI fraud detection. As $900B of public education budget is put back in parents' hands and families sit on $600B in 529s with no good infrastructure to use it, Pathfinder unblocks the money.

The long-term vision is a three-step build: unblock choice funding to become the go-to place for families to navigate options to create more supply of educational options. The end goal is nothing less than a new education system. The team is the standout selling point, an unusual barbell where most are ex-founders and almost everyone has either run a school or run risk at a major fintech. Amaan (dropped out at 14; at 19 built the computer-vision system for the world's largest smart-warehousing company) and Sid (former homeschooler, 4th in the International Cyber Olympiad at 11, ex-Goldman quant) run the company; the team includes a founding engineer from MILA and Elon's SpaceX school, a Head of Risk who led risk at Mercury/Stripe/Circle, payments engineers from Microsoft and Goldman, Arizona's former ESA Deputy Director, and a GTM lead who co-founded Egypt's fintech superapp Khazna.

Pathfinder is in-person in San Francisco, flat, super-IC, and building "a bit of a cult" around genuine belief in the mission.

The Payments / Infrastructure Engineer owns the reliability, scalability, and correctness of Pathfinder's money-movement stack, card issuing, ledger integrity and reconciliation, CI/CD, monitoring, and scaling from hundreds of cardholders to hundreds of thousands. It's one role, not two: anyone genuinely strong at distributed systems and high-data-throughput work handles both the money-movement and platform sides. This is the bucket where things cannot break, if it breaks, the card stops working.

The spike here is system design: understanding the system at a deep, holistic level across many tech vendors, knowing exactly where each part maps and how they work together. Critically, no payments or fintech