Friday Harbor
Friday Harbor

Solutions Engineer

$135–165kUnited StatesRemoteMidFull-time

Posted 2 days ago

The role in short

Write production Python and SQL code to build customer-specific integrations and features, embedding directly with lenders to solve technical problems and ship solutions.

Location:
US Remote

** Candidates must currently live in the US and have work authorization to work for any US employer **

About Friday Harbor

Friday Harbor is the leading AI-native technology platform in US mortgage, the largest sector of consumer credit in the world.

We’re already used on almost 1% of all residential mortgages in the US, and that number is growing rapidly. Three of the top 25 lenders in the country trust Friday Harbor in production today, which means the work you ship here touches real loans and real borrowers right away.

We’re a Seattle-based startup backed by leading venture firms, including Abstract, Mischief, Wischoff, AI2 Incubator, and CoFound.

Our engineering team is small, fully US remote, and comes together for regular off-sites. We care about doing ambitious work while offering flexibility and good work-life balance.

The Role

We’re looking for a Solutions Engineer who enjoys working directly with customers and writing code to solve their problems. You’ll help our lenders launch on Friday Harbor and make the platform work for their needs as they grow.

This is a hands-on engineering role. Most of your time will be spent in the codebase, building and improving integrations, adding product capabilities, and resolving problems on real loans. You’ll own the work from the first customer conversation through production, collaborating with senior engineers and bringing what you learn back into the product.

What You'll Do

  • Build solutions to customer problems.

    Work with customers to understand what they need, define an approach, and ship the code. This could mean carrying a new customer through pilot to full launch, improving an existing workflow, or building a new feature.

  • Support lender integrations.

    Help lenders adopt new APIs and troubleshoot their API and LOS integrations, building tooling and templates so each new integration takes less effort than the last.

  • Resolve technical customer issues.

    Partner with support and sales to investigate customer problems that need technical expertise. Find the cause, understand why it’s happening, and work across teams to resolve.

  • Guide customers through technical decisions.

    Be the person customers turn to when they’re figuring out how to use Friday Harbor, explaining what’s possible and helping them choose the right approach.

  • Be part of the engineering team.

    Work with the rest of the team to shape technical decisions, review code across the codebase, and contribute to broader engineering work. Bring customer context into those conversations and help turn customer needs into product improvements.

What We're Looking For

  • Strong engineering skills.

    You can write production-quality Python and SQL, build and debug API integrations, and work with messy data in formats like JSON and XML. You can find your way around an unfamiliar codebase, read logs, and trace a problem to its cause.

  • Experience working directly with customers.

    You’ve worked directly with customers and enjoy it. You’re comfortable in customer meetings, setting clear expectations, and being the go-to technical person for the customers you work with.

  • Clear communication.

    You can explain technical decisions to underwriters and operations leaders as easily as to engineers. You write things down well.

  • Project ownership.

    You can manage competing priorities and see work through to completion, keeping customers and the rest of the team aligned on progress, decisions, and next steps.

  • Product judgement.

    You look beyond the initial request to understand the problem. You can recognize when to improve the broader product, when a custom solution makes sense, and when to suggest a different approach, working through those tradeoffs with customers and engineering.

Usually 2+ years as a software engineer, plus real experience working directly with customers, whether in an engineering role or something like support

Nice to Have

  • Mortgage industry experience, such as underwriting, lender operations, or loan origination systems like Encompass.
  • Experience with AI products, including setting customer expectations around accuracy and edge cases.
  • Working with regulated customers and their security, compliance, and vendor review processes.
  • Experience as an early engineer at a startup.

You don’t need mortgage experience before joining. Strong engineering skills and real experience with customers matter more to us than knowing the industry on day one.

Why Join

You’ll work directly with some of the largest lenders in the country, with experienced engineers alongside you, and see the impact of your work right away. The work is close to the product, has immediate customer impact, and what you learn from customers shapes what the team builds next.

If you enjoy being in the room with customers, writing code to solve their problems, and turning what you learn into a better product, we’d like to talk.

We offer a base salary of $135,000 to $165,000, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Prep for this interview

3 questions likely to come up at Friday Harbor, each matched to a line in this posting.

  1. 1Integrations and APIs
    They wrote: “Help lenders adopt new APIs and troubleshoot their API and LOS integrations, building tooling and templates so each new integration takes less effort than the last.”

    Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.

    How to answer

    Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.

    1. Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
    2. Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
    3. Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
    4. Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what

    Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.

  2. 2Cloud, deployment and security
    They wrote: “Working with regulated customers and their security, compliance, and vendor review processes.”

    The customer's security team sends a 200-question review. How do you handle it?

    How to answer

    Why they ask: Security reviews often block deals. FDEs help get through them.

    1. Start from your company's standard answers (SOC 2 report, past reviews)
    2. Answer clearly; don't oversell
    3. Bring in your security team for anything you're unsure of
    4. Keep the new answers for the next customer

    Tip: Reuse past answers, flag honest gaps, and offer a call for the hard questions.

  3. 3Coding
    They wrote: “You’ve worked directly with customers and enjoy it. You’re comfortable in customer meetings, setting clear expectations, and being the go-to technical person for the customers you work with.”

    Build a small in-memory cache. Then add expiry. Then a size limit.

    How to answer

    Why they ask: Staged exercises show how your code holds up when requirements change mid-interview, like at a customer.

    1. Start with get and set on a dictionary, plus tests
    2. Store an expiry time with each value and check it on read
    3. Track use order and evict the least recently used entry when full
    4. Say what you'd change for many threads or many machines

    Tip: Keep the first version simple and well tested so the next stage is a small change.

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Friday Harbor

$135–165k · Remote

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