Software Engineer - Platform, Accounting

Full-time · Engineering · San Francisco, CA (3 days/week in office)

An engineer to build the multi-organization, multi-currency ledger that runs our books - working directly with accounting, toward a close measured in minutes rather than days.

We are building the ledger that runs our books: multi-organization, multi-currency, and double-entry. It has to hold up across legal entities and regulators, across Bitcoin and fiat, and across the reporting requirements of a regulated life insurer. And we think it can be fast. Insurance closes have always been measured in days or weeks - reconciliation, chasing exceptions, waiting on entries. In the age of AI agents, we believe an insurance ledger can close in minutes, and we're building toward that from a blank page rather than retrofitting it onto forty-year-old systems.

This is a specialized, hands-on engineering role embedded with our accounting department. You'll sit with accountants, learn how they actually close a period, and build the system that lets them do it. It's deep, precise work with real consequences: the ledger is what the financial statements are built on.

We're looking for someone who wants to go deep here as an individual contributor - the person who understands the financial core of the company better than anyone else and owns it.

What You'll Do

• Design and build our multi-organization, multi-currency general ledger - chart of accounts, journal entries, postings, period close, intercompany, FX and BTC revaluation, reconciliation
• Work directly with the accounting team to elicit and refine requirements - you own that relationship and that discovery
• Get the hard modeling decisions right: idempotency, immutability and correction semantics, precision and rounding, audit trails, effective dating
• Build the reconciliation and reporting surfaces that accounting, finance, and our auditors depend on
• Make the ledger legible to the rest of engineering, so other product verticals can post to it correctly
• Write production code across the stack (Python backend, React/TypeScript frontend, PostgreSQL)
• Use AI tooling to move faster, with the judgment to know when its output needs a second look
• Participate in business-hours on-call rotation shared across the engineering team (no nights/weekends)

How We Work

We don't have product managers. You'll work with the accounting team directly to understand the problem, shape the solution, and explain the tradeoffs - that discovery is part of the job, not something that happens before it reaches you.

We lean into AI tooling and you'll have it. It's a real accelerant here, and we expect you to use it well. But financial systems fail quietly - in ways that look correct until someone finds them at audit - so the work still rests on thinking carefully about the problem, the data model, and the failure modes.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Direct experience building or operating accounting, ledger, or double-entry financial systems. Adjacent experience counts where the accounting semantics were genuinely yours: core banking, payments and settlement, exchange or clearing back office, billing and revenue recognition at scale
• Strong backend engineering foundation, with the ability to ship the frontend surfaces your system needs
• Experience working directly with non-technical domain experts - accountants, controllers, auditors - and turning their problems into software
• Fluency with AI development tools, and the judgment to evaluate what they produce
• Comfort with ambiguity and a habit of teaching yourself the domain
• Low-ego approach and a high bar for precision
• Based in the SF Bay Area with the ability to work in-office 3 days per week

What Makes You Stand Out

• Multi-entity and multi-currency accounting experience - consolidation, intercompany elimination, FX revaluation
• Experience supporting a statutory audit or a regulated financial reporting cycle
• Insurance domain exposure (statutory vs. GAAP/IFRS reporting, reserving, premium and claims accounting)
• Interest in or experience with cryptocurrency, and the accounting questions Bitcoin raises
• Startup experience on small engineering teams (<10 people)
• A CPA, an accounting background, or a track record of being the engineer accountants trust

Technical Environment

• Backend: Python
• Frontend: React/TypeScript
• Database: PostgreSQL
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Cloud: AWS

Why Join Us?

• A problem with a right answer: Financial correctness is unforgiving, and getting it right is genuinely satisfying work
• Real Ownership: You'll own the ledger - the system everything else settles against
• Unique Domain: Build the accounting foundation for first-of-their-kind Bitcoin-denominated financial products
• Direct Influence: Small team, flat organization, direct access to leadership
• A seat with the business: You work with accounting every day, not through a translation layer
• Benefits:
  • Fully covered health, dental, and vision for you and your family
  • Meals provided in office
  • Two annual company off sites (fully paid)

Our Values

• Keep your word. Honor commitments to clients and each other.
• Build for the future. We measure success in decades; look ahead without losing sight of what matters today.
• Be curious. Our advantage is understanding the world, the market, and each other.
• Have fun. Enjoy the work. Find humor where you can. Rest when needed. Say when you need help.

How to Apply

Email careers@meanwhile.bm with your resume and the role you'd be interested in.

Company & Funding

We're building the world's largest long-term insurer, using digital money and AI to serve billions of people profitably. We want anyone, anywhere, to be able to save for their future, protect their family, and build wealth across generations.

We face a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a vertically integrated life (re)insurer. Our product offerings are globally unique, making it possible for us to scale our balance sheet, build modern systems from scratch, and then directly compete to win a market that is 3% of global GDP.

We've raised over $140M to date. Sam Altman and Lachy Groom led our initial raise, and they've since been joined by leading investors in AI, insurance, and Bitcoin, including Northwestern Mutual, Apollo, Bain Capital, Pantera, Haun, Framework, Fulgur Ventures, MS&AD, Mouro, Stillmark, and Wences Casares.

Our Bermuda operating subsidiary holds the the world's only license to issue life insurance denominated entirely in Bitcoin. It's also the only company in the world with audited financials stated in Bitcoin. (If you join us, you can expect to do a lot of things no one's ever done before.)

Engineering at Meanwhile

With the advent of ubiquitous AI tooling, the dynamic range in individual engineering effectiveness is only widening.

At Meanwhile, we're planning for a world in which small, tight-knit engineering teams (supported by a small, tight-knit platform team) own entire lines of business, and are compensated accordingly.

We're attacking a huge market with the leanest, most effective team in insurance. Where incumbents employ a thousand people, we think we can make it work with a hundred or a dozen.

We're looking for hungry ICs (and former managers who see the writing on the wall) interested in pushing the boundaries of engineering productivity in a vertically integrated, regulated organization.

We're growing quickly. You will fix million-dollar bugs.

On the business side, we hire for deep domain expertise, ambition, and the creativity to figure out the previously impossible. Because our engineers work closely with people from the business, they need curiosity, flexibility, an appetite for (and the ability to digest) complex context, and strong communication skills.

Our view is that ownership is taken, not given. You will be successful here if your work progressively builds others' trust in your ability to identify, attack, and solve larger and larger problems, including those that no one else has anticipated.

We believe that "code wins arguments," that prototyping is often the best first step in a design process, and that the impact of velocity is non-linear.

You are excited by putting up multiple meaningful changes, or writing thousands of lines of code, in a day (even though you know that deleting lines of code is more exciting than writing them, and that, occasionally, deep reflection is required in order to ship anything).

You aren't fazed by building systems that don't work out — sometimes, you have to throw code away.

Intellectual honesty is non-negotiable. You love to learn and to teach, to ask questions and to answer them, and to be transparent about your uncertainty.

You are eager to learn, with the rest of the team, how to work with AI tools, including agents, in order to move faster and ship better, more complete versions of your ideas. You will experiment with new ways of working, with the expectation that some of them will be unsuccessful, and you will teach others what works.

This is the most exciting time in decades to be a competent, technically ambitious engineer. We want to offer you the opportunity to see what's really possible and how much better you can get at your craft.