Engineering at Modern Treasury

We’re improving how businesses move and track funds at scale.

Modern Treasury allows businesses to move money with confidence. Specifically, it’s an API and web application that allows teams to manage the funds in their corporate bank accounts. To give an example: when Airbnb just started out, they didn’t have much business yet, so their founders used hacky solutions like uploading CSVs to their bank portal. However, once there were many thousands of venues and stays, mistakes likely started piling up. (Like missing error notifications when some subset of the payments failed.)

Had Modern Treasury existed then, companies like Airbnb might have used our software as the interface between them and their core bank accounts. Instead, they had to integrate directly with banks that use decades-old mainframe technology, requiring custom work for each bank. As of this writing, Airbnb has a money team of ~150 engineers (>10% of their total engineers) who maintain their integrations with banks all over the world. With Modern Treasury, we’re streamlining payment operations within one interface, helping companies like Gusto and ClassPass reconcile over $2B in funds every month (and growing!).

Two of our three founders are engineers.

Fun fact: they are still the #1 and #2 top contributors to our monorepo (as of this writing) even though they’ve largely stopped writing code circa 2020. If Facebook’s operating ethos is “Move fast and break things” then Modern Treasury’s is to “Do it right the first time.” In practice, that means we don’t have a deadline-driven culture; we’re willing to trade off speed of shipping for correctness. We stress this point because we are entrusted with monitoring and moving our customers’ most valuable assets—their money. They trust us to be an infrastructure provider, so we are unwilling to compromise on reliability and security.

One memorable example of this is how our Co-Founder and CTO, Sam, spent the company’s first few weeks encoding our AWS configuration in YAML files. This enabled us to use CloudFormation to provision our infrastructure and ensured every change is version controlled and goes through code review. Considering how many incidents are caused by accidental changes in the AWS UI, it’s proven to be a wise upfront investment. We’ve had 100% infrastructure-as-code coverage since day one, which many larger companies’ infra teams can spend years trying to achieve.

Modern Treasury is a great example of an “earned secret.” In some sense, it’s a small miracle that the company was able to get started at all. Banks are highly regulated entities and tend to be extremely selective when partnering with established tech companies, let alone young startups. So how did an early Modern Treasury consisting of just the founders convince a bank to give them both read and write access to a client’s account?

For one, Sam, Dimitri, and Matt worked together at LendingHome to build bank integrations for handling billions of dollars of mortgage volume. There, they realized that the problem of integrating directly with banks extends to any company trying to move money at scale. They earned a deep understanding of banks, from their incentive structures to their technical architecture. Early bank partners like Silicon Valley Bank found them credible because they knew exactly what to ask for and who to ask.

Today, our team hails from companies like Stripe, Flexport, Affirm, Brex, Square, ClassPass, Segment, Microsoft, and Twilio, with a few YC founders as well. Shruthi, our Head of Engineering, recently joined the team and brings a wealth of knowledge from her time at WhatsApp, where she led the payments engineering team and built the product from scratch.

While we’re humbled to work with smart, talented people, we don’t look for a certain company name or university on your resume. In fact, some engineers like Ariel, have non-traditional backgrounds (in Ariel’s case, working in IT before being a software engineer). Ultimately, we’re looking for motivated, hard-working people to join our team who bring diverse experiences and viewpoints. We raised a $85M Series C in October 2021 and are continuing to grow the team. If any of this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you!

Our business model is to grow as our customers grow.

As such, we go above and beyond to help our customers architect their banking backends and support their payment flows. The majority of our referrals currently come from the banks themselves. A client will go to them and say something like, “I need to send 100,000 payments per month, and I can’t do that through your dashboard.” Thus, the more banks we support, the more companies we can support too, so there’s a market pull from both sides. Additionally, within each bank there are different capabilities we’re working to support, which include everything from ACH to For Benefit Of accounts.

Our goal is to maintain an intense but sustainable working pace.

We work hard to deliver for our customers and grow quickly, but there’s a healthy middleground where this can be done without burning out the team. Andy, one of our engineering managers, joined as employee #10 and says it’s because our founders do a great job of leading by example. This summer Dimitri, our CEO, went on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon and Matt, our CPO, spent a couple weeks in Europe.

Dimitri firmly believes the number one thing you can do for your team is to not burn out. While this runs counter to many people’s hero-mode thinking of “I have to grind to ship this because it’s best for the company,” we think differently. That’s why folks at Modern Treasury are encouraged to take time to recharge and enjoy their passions and hobbies outside of work.

People at Modern Treasury share a deep desire to learn and grow.

Our business has grown rapidly – we’ve gone from processing $100M per month in volume to more than $2B per month in the past 12 months. Much of that growth can be explained by how our team tends to be intellectually curious and is excited to push one another in a psychologically safe way. Giving and receiving constructive feedback is important to us and we’re looking for people who likewise have growth mindsets.

One of the ways we feed our collective curiosity is with our weekly Coffee Breaks, which started as a ritual for us to stay connected at the beginning of the pandemic. Each week we invite a guest and have an informal, off-the-record Q&A with them over Zoom. We’ve been fortunate to hear from some really impressive guests, including Charlie Munger and Jessica Livingston.

Another great example is our internship program. Our philosophy is to expect as much from interns as we do full-time engineers, rather than assigning menial tasks or projects that don’t actually ship. Don’t just take our word for it either – here’s what one of our former interns, Nisha, had to say about her experience.

Finally, we offer several benefits to support both your physical and mental well-being, including four months paid parental leave, a $1K stipend to set up your home office, a $500 annual stipend for books, and a $100 monthly open source sponsorship stipend.

We subscribe to No Meeting Wednesdays.

Our team is spread across the U.S., with clusters in the Bay Area, New York, and LA. We’re mostly hiring within the contiguous U.S. but we also have team members who work from Hawaii. If you do need a H-1B visa or a green card, we’ll help with immigration requirements so we can give you peace of mind. In fact, our CTO personally spent the time with USCIS to get our second engineer, Sean, here from Ireland.

Given the varying time zones, flexibility is baked into our culture. We have a company-wide all hands every Monday and engineering team meetings fortnightly on Fridays. We’re also sensitive to meeting fatigue, so we keep Wednesdays free of internal meetings.

We aspire to have a good balance between promoting from within and hiring externally.

As we scale, there’s a lot of opportunity to take on new projects, grow your skill set, and level-up in your career. As Matt, one of our engineering managers (who was promoted from within), puts it, “I was first tasked with becoming our expert in Real Time Payments. That grew into a general expertise for all bank integrations. Now I'm managing the team responsible for payments.”

Several other team members have been promoted internally as well. For example, Andy Qin was promoted to engineering manager; Julien and Sean were promoted to senior software engineer. We also like to foster talent from our internship program (see Committed to Personal Growth above) and have extended full-time offers to interns like Aaron and Nisha. Regardless of if you’re just starting out in your career or are further along, we want to help you gain the skills and expertise to get where you want to go.