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