Senior Software Engineer

About Elayne

$3 trillion in assets pass between families every year. In this $250B industry, the process behind it is still manual: faxes, phone trees, spreadsheets, and grief. It can take families hundreds of hours, often years, to get through.

Elayne is the system that automates all of it. We're a YCombinator and Accel backed company building the AI platform for estate settlement, and families are already using it to get through one of the hardest moments of their lives. We have a real product in people's hands, a modern stack we move fast on, and a long list of challenging, interesting problems ahead.

About The Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our engineering team and own major systems end to end. You'll work directly with our CTO and the founding team, meaning you get real ownership: you influence what to build, build it, and ship it.

Why this role is different

Estate settlement operates on messy, high-stakes data: legal, financial, and institutional records scattered across dozens of systems that were never built to talk to each other. We’re here to bring peace to families with product that feels accurate and automated.

You'll build agentic systems and LLM pipelines where correctness truly matters, because the outputs carry real legal and financial weight. And you’ll build thoughtful product where nothing has existed before.

Turning estate settlement into something a grieving family can actually trust, is a fundamentally human and deeply challenging engineering problem. If you've been craving interesting human-centric product and AI problems with real depth instead of building another SaaS app, this is it.

What you'll build

• Solving hard problems: agentic asset and inventory processing, LLM-driven extraction with provenance and confidence, and entity resolution across messy, multi-source data. Make AI trustworthy while dealing with legal and financial stakes.
• Integrations with the outside world: banks, government systems, legal entities, and data aggregators, stitched into a single real-time view of a family's estate.
• Brand-new product: some of the most exciting work is still ahead, richer loss support for families, partner interfaces, and plenty more on the roadmap. You'll get to take ideas from zero to shipped and influence what we build next.
• New systems and foundations: the backend and data platforms behind financial assets, document intake, and real-time progress tracking. And end to end efficient systems designed with sound architecture, observability, and the standards that keep us shipping safely with sensitive data.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years building and shipping production software, strong in Python and/or TypeScript
• Extra points if you're a generalist who likes wearing many hats, or a former founder who knows what it takes to build something from nothing
• Experience with LLM pipelines or AI agents, or the ability and appetite to ramp fast
• A strong bias for correctness and data integrity, especially with sensitive and regulated data
• High-conviction and low-ego: strong opinions held loosely, and you'd rather seek what’s right rather than win the argument
• Comfortable in fintech, legaltech, healthtech, or other similar categories is a bonus, as is experience with Postgres and data engineering
• Real systems-design range: you make sound architecture tradeoffs under ambiguity and own problems end to end

Logistics

Full-time, in person with the team in New York City (3 days/week). Compensation: $170-230k plus equity, health insurance, a 401(k), and [additional benefits].

Interview Process

1. Intro call: motivation, experience, mutual fit
2. Technical interview: oriented towards practical problem-solving
3. Systems design
4. Take-home: a short, scoped realistic problem
5. Final conversation with the CTO