Platform Engineer

Howard Financial is a full-service back-office solution for companies and entities with bookkeeping, payroll, and bespoke reporting needs that require accuracy, timeliness, and institutional-quality reporting without the burden of full-time staff. Founded in 2023, our team of more than 100 professionals supports clients across a diverse range of industries. We are tech-forward and focused on working smarter to better service our clients and deliver industry-leading solutions.

The Role

We are hiring a Platform Engineer on a contract basis to join the team building Howard's internal platform. You'll work alongside operators, leadership, and other engineers to ship the back-end systems, dashboards, and automations that run our business: practice management, internal reporting, team operations, and the connective tissue between them. We expect this role to be solutions-oriented and leverage the latest technology (Claude Code, etc.) to ship quickly.

What You'll Do

• Internal Platform Development
  • Build and maintain the back-end services that power Howard's internal applications
  • Develop dashboards and operational tools used by leadership, controllers, and the broader team
  • Ensure performance and reliability across large datasets (thousands of records, recurring jobs, scheduled syncs)
  • Contribute to a centralized internal platform that consolidates workflows across teams
• Internal Systems Integration
  • Build middleware and API integrations between Howard's internal systems
  • Replace manual workarounds and spreadsheet bridges with automated, event-driven data flows
  • Maintain a clean source of truth across the systems our team uses every day
• Automated Workflow Development
  • Engineer event-triggered automations that move data and actions across our internal stack without human intervention
  • Build the backend logic that ties operational events to downstream effects across other internal systems
• Data Normalization & Schema Mapping
  • Build migration and sync logic that handles inconsistent data and maps it into a standardized internal schema
  • Own the data engineering layer that makes our internal platforms speak to each other cleanly
• Custom Auth & Permissions
  • Build authentication and authorization layers for internal tools, with granular permissioning so sensitive data is cordoned off by department, role, or user level
  • Use HRIS data (e.g., Rippling) as a schema to drive internal permissions and team-level views

Required Skills

• Fluent using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, similar) as a core part of your workflow
• Strong full-stack background with emphasis on backend and infrastructure
• Deep experience with RESTful APIs and custom middleware development
• Track record handling dirty data migrations and schema normalization
• Comfortable with serverless and modern cloud architecture
• Frontend competence (React/HTML/JS/CSS) sufficient to ship full features when needed

System Ecosystem (Fluency Expected)

• You should be able to read API docs and reason about the data model for the kinds of platforms we operate on:
• Practice management and workflow tools (Notion, internal task systems)
• HRIS and identity platforms (Rippling and similar)
• Database and serverless platforms (Supabase, Postgres, similar)

The Engineer Profile

• Operational empathy. You can sit with a business process and translate it directly into automation logic
• Ambiguity tolerance. Comfortable when the spec evolves based on what the business is learning
• Lean middleware mindset. You build the right-sized pipe, not the cathedral

Why Howard

• Real engineering problems with real business impact
• Direct collaboration with operators and founders, no layers
• A working environment where AI tooling is encouraged