Software Engineer - Backend

Department: Engineering

Location: Remote/Hybrid, New York, NY or San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $170K – $225K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Luminary

Luminary is the AI-native system of action for wealth transfer services.

High net worth households controlling more than $90 trillion in assets are meaningfully underserved by technology that was built for the mass market. As private client investment and banking products have commoditized, these clients are looking for more tax and wealth transfer advice, advice that has previously been impossible to deliver at scale.

Luminary solves this problem by transforming complex estate planning and ownership documents into a structured, proprietary data asset that powers verticalized, agent-driven workflows for tax and wealth transfer services. Our built-in multi-firm collaboration connects a clients full advisor ecosystem, and is the core infrastructure that enables our customers to deliver a highly personalized, end-to-end wealth transfer service offering at scale.

Our 1,000+ customers are leaders across the private client services ecosystem: wealth managers from exclusive multi-family offices through top private banks and trust companies, national tax advisory practices, and law firms among the AM Law 100. Our focus and proprietary data position us to expand from a wedge in wealth transfer advice into large adjacent markets including trust administration and estate distribution.

Founded and led by CEO David Barnard, former Head of Wealth Management at AllianceBernstein, Luminary is backed by 8VC, Fin Capital, Rockefeller Capital, Focus Financial Partners, and several family offices.

How we work

• Every engineer ships to production multiple times a day. We make small, reviewable changes that go out through CI as soon as theyre ready.

• Modern tooling. Meticulous, Amp, Honeycomb, Temporal, PostHog, Braintrust. We keep the team small and invest in tooling for leverage.

• Engineers own outcomes. Youll talk to customers and feel their wins and pain points, sit with our in-house subject matter experts, and help us build a great business.

• We support both remote and in-office preferences. We have an office in NYC near Bryant Park and a lively in-office culture, but if remote works better for you, youll be in good company.
  

The Opportunity

A familys estate plan structure rarely fits neatly into a schema. A trust may have been amended three times, an LLC might be held by two of the children through a different trust, and a beneficiary is often also a trustee. Provisions frequently depend on conditions that havent happened yet.

Modeling that correctly is the first half of the job. The second is computing against it, which is where our tax engine comes in: estate and gift tax, generation-skipping transfers, strategies like GRATs and ILITs and QPRTs, and projections that ask what happens if a business grows sharply in value ten years from now and how that changes a familys charitable and family giving goals. As far as we know, its the most complete implementation of the US transfer tax code in software anywhere.

You dont need to have worked on any of this before! None of us had. Were looking for someone who likes modeling complicated real-world systems accurately, and who wants to learn a deep domain from the JDs and CPAs on staff.

What youll do

• Own the modeling engine. Transfer tax computation, waterfall and distribution modeling, and the consolidation work that brings our calculations under one engine.

• Model the domain flexibly and thoughtfully. Trusts and estates are complex and have a lot of moving parts. Data modeling is a really important part of this role.

• Make correctness checkable. Youll work with our JDs and CPAs to validate against how practitioners compute things. We regularly talk to various state attorneys general to dig into the nitty-gritty of how specific interactions work in their tax code.

• Support our agents. Extraction and agentic workflows are only as good as the data model they write into. We dont want agents doing any math, so we expose this deterministic layer (and the ability to do hypothetical modeling) via tools.

Who you are

Four or more years of software engineering experience, at companies with strong engineering practices. Beyond that:

• You prefer domain complexity to infrastructure complexity. The hard part here is modeling an intricate real-world system correctly, not scaling a queue.

• Rigorous about correctness. You think in edge cases, and youre uncomfortable shipping logic you cant verify.

• Product-minded. You want to know why a calculation matters and who depends on it. Youll be shaping requirements, not receiving them.

• Day to day tools

  • Our backend is Go, Postgres, Temporal, and GraphQL

  • Our monitoring is mostly in Honeycomb, Braintrust, and PostHog

• You communicate well. With half the team remote, overcommunication is the name of the game!

Why youll love working here

• Youll be one of a small, senior team of engineers building a complex and high-value product. Youll get a lot of trust and responsibility early on.

• Youll work closely with our CEO, Head of Engineering, and Head of Product.

• Youll help build foundational product in a nascent category, with a lot of room to expand into large adjacent markets.

• Youll ship constantly and hear fast feedback from customers.

We earnestly believe that Luminary represents a one-of-a-kind opportunity to have massive impact at profitable scale, and to have a ton of fun along the way.

Benefits we offer

We believe firmly that happy, healthy employees do their best work. To that end, we offer:

• 👩🏻‍⚕️ 100% employee health insurance coverage (plus 50% dependent coverage)

• 🧘🏽‍♀️ Monthly wellness, commuter, and educational stipends

• 🏖️ 4 weeks PTO, plus holidays

• 🏢 NYC office near Bryant Park, for those who want it. Remote-friendly by default.

• 💰 401(k) plan

• 👶 Parental leave policy

Compensation

• Base salary range of $170k–$225k, plus meaningful equity. Actual compensation depends on many factors, including relevant experience and skillset.

• At this time, Luminary is unable to sponsor employment visas or provide immigration support.