Software Engineer

Who We Are

Impruve is a boutique forward-deployed engineering firm that helps wealth management firms get real business results from AI. We embed directly with our clients to build production data pipelines, AI tools, custom software, and compliance infrastructure for top-tier firms managing billions in client assets. We have more demand than we can currently serve, and we're growing the team to meet it.

Our founders previously built and exited Packback, an AI company that served more than 3 million users. We operate with the speed of a small startup and the rigor of a top firm.

We're four engineers right now, and we're building how we work on purpose, not backfilling a culture after the fact. We care about doing right by clients and by each other. We take the work seriously: real client money, real compliance risk, real production systems. We do team-wide retros every two months to make sure we're all on the same page and continually improving.

We pair early and often, across the team, because it's how we actually get better. If you notice something interesting mid-task, we want you to flag it and pull someone in, not disappear down a rabbit hole solo. When something breaks, we run blameless postmortems; the point is fixing the system, not finding someone to blame.

We don't expect you to walk in with all the answers. Nobody here has them either. We expect you to be scrappy: willing to try something, see what happens, and figure it out with the team rather than wait until you're sure.

You won't be joining something fully formed. You'd be joining our founding engineering team, with real say in how this team works, not just what it ships.

Why This Role

Most wealth management firms want AI in their business and have access to the frontier models. What’s missing is the engineering capability to deploy it effectively and compliantly. That’s the gap Impruve fills.

You’d join a small, senior team doing real client work from day one. You won’t be watching from the sidelines or building internal tools nobody uses — you’ll own workstreams inside live engagements, with experienced engineers around you who pair early and often. The learning curve is steep and the reps are real.

Some of our best candidates came to software from somewhere else — finance, operations, consulting, the military. If you built a career doing real work with real clients and then taught yourself to code, that combination is exactly what we’re looking for. Business judgment and client instincts are hard to teach; engineering skills, we can help you sharpen.

What You’ll Do

• Own Workstreams on Client Engagements: You’ll take a piece of a live engagement — a data pipeline, an AI workflow, a frontend feature — and own it from spec to production. A senior engineer owns the overall engagement, so you have real support while you build the judgment that comes from shipping things that matter.

• Pair Across the Team: Pairing is how we work, not a fallback for when you’re stuck. You’ll pair with teammates across the stack regularly — that’s how you get better fast and how we catch problems early.

• Work Across the Stack: Data pipelines, backend services, frontend, RAG and agent workflows. You don’t need to know all of it coming in, but you’ll touch most of it within your first few months.

• Ship AI That Works in Production: The systems you build will face real users and real compliance reviewers, not just demos. You’ll learn what it takes to make AI reliable in environments where mistakes have real consequences.

• Work AI-Natively: Agentic coding tools are how we build — Claude Code, spec-driven development, custom agent skills. You’ll use them daily and bring what you learn back to the team.

• Help Shape How We Work: We’re still building our norms. You’ll have real input into how we review code, run retros, and onboard new engineers.

What You’ll Bring to the Team

• 1–3 Years of Professional Engineering Experience: You’ve shipped production code that real users depended on. Internships count if you owned real work. Career changers: if you spent years in another field and then made the switch to engineering, we consider that a strength, not a gap.

• Business Sense: You understand how businesses work because you’ve worked in one — not just on the engineering side. You can talk to a client about their problem, not just the technical solution.

• Genuine Curiosity: You pick things up because you want to, not because someone assigned them. You’ve taught yourself something meaningful recently and you can talk about how.

• Comfort with Ambiguity: You’d rather try something and learn from what breaks than wait until you have the full picture. Client work is messy — you’re okay with that.

• Collaboration Over Solo Heroics: You’d rather pair through a hard problem than sit on it alone. You ask for help early, not as a last resort.

• Clear Communication: You explain technical work clearly to engineers and non-engineers alike. Our clients are wealth management professionals, not developers.

• Care About the Details: Testing, monitoring, documentation. The unglamorous work that keeps production systems running.

• AI as a Tool, Not a Crutch: You use AI to work more efficiently; you don’t use it to replace original thinking, creativity, and human collaboration.

Stack:

Python, Node.js, Express, TypeScript, Next.js, MongoDB, Redis, AWS ECS, Docker, LangChain/LangGraph. We care more about curiosity and sound judgment than a checklist match.

Compensation

$100,000 to $150,000 all-cash compensation.

Our Workplace

We work on a hybrid in-person / remote schedule from our Chicago office, but we're open to fully remote for candidates outside Chicago. Close collaboration is part of how we build, and we make remote work well.

Because we pair frequently and work closely as a team, we hire in the US Central Time Zone. For exceptional candidates, we're open to ±1 hour (Eastern or Mountain).

Different Perspectives Make Us Better

Research consistently shows that women and people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a role unless they check every box, while others apply anyway. If that's you:

apply anyway

. We care more about curiosity, scrappiness, and kindness than a perfect resume match, and we build a better team when the people on it don't all think alike.

Hiring Process

We respect your time. We keep the hiring process tight and decide quickly:

• Intro call (45 minutes).

• Team interview with the founders, including a working session on a realistic engineering problem.

• Decision and offer.

Requires US work authorization; we can't sponsor visas.