Tech Lead, Foundations

TECH LEAD, FOUNDATIONS

Remote (ET & CT time zones only; some travel required)

ABOUT US

Clasp is a venture-backed, mission-driven startup transforming access to education and career pathways. We are revolutionizing the way employers attract and retain critical talent and the way colleges and universities support their students through education financing, all while tackling the student debt crisis. (Yep, we think BIG.) We like to think of ourselves as more than a fintech; we're a catalyst for economic mobility.

A Forbes Fintech 50 company, portfolio company of SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management, the largest HR organization out there!) and recipient of "Startup of the Year" by StartUp Boston, Clasp is driven by our commitment to social impact and innovation.

Our work spans two business lines:

Clasp Talent helps healthcare employers attract and retain critical talent by connecting them with diverse candidates and using student loan repayment as a powerful recruiting and retention tool. We meaningfully connect employers, educational institutions, and learners to drive mutual benefit.

Clasp Finance equips colleges and universities with lending technology to launch and operate their own private student loan programs, enabling schools to step in and support their students directly with financial aid.

Join us on our journey to give power to learners and unlock fulfilling careers that drive positive change in their communities and beyond.

WHO WE NEED

We're looking for a Tech Lead to anchor our new Foundations team in Clasp Talent. Foundations owns the core services and infrastructure that every Talent domain team builds on: user management and SSO, notifications, data exchange with employers, schools, and partners, and the shared platform patterns that sit underneath them. Your job is to make those building blocks reliable, well documented, and easy for other teams to adopt, so product teams ship faster without rebuilding the same plumbing.

This is a player-coach role. You will write and review code every week, set technical direction for the team, and mentor engineers of all levels. You'll partner with product, the other domain teams, and our technical leadership to decide what belongs in the foundation and what doesn't. You use AI tools deliberately to move faster, you have strong opinions about APIs and system design, and you can explain a tradeoff to a non-engineer in a way that leads to a decision.

At Clasp we run a DevOps culture where engineers have full ownership of the code they write and the infrastructure it runs on. We want someone who is excited to shape the architecture behind the product roadmap and the Clasp business, and to grow alongside us.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the technical direction for Talent's shared services, including user management, authentication and SSO, role-based access control, and notification systems (email, in-app, and other channels).

• Design and evolve our approach to data exchange: APIs, events, webhooks, and file-based integrations with employers, schools, HRIS and other partner systems, with clear contracts, versioning, and observability.

• Build reusable services, libraries, and patterns that domain teams can adopt with minimal friction. Treat other engineering teams as your customers: write the docs, gather feedback, and measure adoption.

• Write code alongside the team across the front end and back end, and set the bar for code quality, system design, and security through hands-on contribution and code review.

• Work with Product, Security, and Compliance to define requirements for identity, access, consent, and data handling in a regulated, financial-services-adjacent environment.

• Break large initiatives into milestones, spec stories with the team and product leadership, and balance platform investment and technical debt against feature requests from domain teams.

• Mentor and coach engineers, and help the team build an engineering culture of collaborati