Staff Engineer Software (Drools)

Location: Remote in New York, United States

Salary: $150,000–$170,000 base salary per year, plus performance-based compensation.

Company

hirify.global provides personal loans, credit cards, and other financial products focused on responsible access to credit for nonprime customers.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and maintain Drools (KIE) rules using DRL, Decision Tables, and Rule Templates for underwriting, eligibility, and policy logic.
• Optimize rule execution for low latency and high throughput, including salience, agenda groups, rule flows, and conflict resolution.
• Ensure decisions are deterministic, explainable, auditable, and aligned with regulatory requirements.
• Contribute to decisioning and rules architecture, including reusable rule sets, versioning, and controlled rollouts.
• Develop unit and scenario-based tests, troubleshoot production rule-execution issues, and support deployments across development, QA, and production.
• Act as a Drools and business-rules subject-matter expert, mentor junior engineers, and establish standards for authoring, documentation, testing, and maintainability.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience and 7+ years of hands-on experience with Drools/KIE.
• Strong proficiency in Java and Spring/Spring Boot.
• Deep experience with DRL, Decision Tables, Rule Templates, and stateless and stateful KIE sessions.
• Experience with rule performance tuning and debugging.
• Experience building or supporting policy-driven or decisioning systems.
• Strong understanding of business rules management systems (BRMS).
• Exposure to cloud platforms and CI/CD pipelines.

Nice to have

• Experience building a lightweight orchestration layer using Apache Pekko.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements and an inclusive, customer-focused culture.
• Medical, prescription, dental, vision, hearing, accident, hospital indemnity, and life insurance options.
• Up to 4% matching 401(k) and an employee stock purchase plan with a 10% share discount.
• Tuition reimbursement, paid vacation, personal days, sick leave, holidays, and volunteer time.