About Central

What is Central?

Central is the only payroll & benefits platform that handles all the government bullshit automatically.

While traditional payroll providers force you to manage every state registration & HR task, Central actually does it all - saving you 60+ hours and thousands in fines.

Learn more at centralhq.com

Why Central?

We’re on a mission to eliminate all business bullshit

Building a company is still way too hard. Founders still have to register in multiple states to run payroll, set up workers' compensation, pay various payroll-related taxes, deal with intimidating government mail, update addresses across state filings, and troubleshoot with insurance companies.

Imagine a world where ambitious founders have more time to solve the world's most difficult problems—from preventing medical mistakes in hospitals to building next-generation night vision to curing brain cancer. That's what founders on Central are doing.

Currently, hundreds of companies run on Central, and we're growing rapidly. We've raised a huge seed/A from YC and some of the best investors in the world (not announced yet, happy to share in private).

As a founding member, you'll have a seat at the table and help Central scale to serve thousands of companies.

Our culture

Central is a high-performance sports team with an extremely high bar.

Here are our 3 core values:

1. Think clearly

2. Show high agency

3. Craft magic

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What you’ll do

• Architect mission-critical workflows: Design, build, and maintain stateful, end-to-end systems that ensure data integrity (idempotency, reconciliation, audit trails) and meet stringent compliance and reliability requirements.

• Iterate rapidly: Ship incremental, production-ready features in days—prototype, gather real user feedback, and refine relentlessly.

• Own your domain: Act as the technical product lead for core platform areas—setting standards for code quality, observability, testing, and operational excellence.

• Delight and empower customers: Partner with Product and Support to translate user pain points into clean, intuitive solutions that scale from a single startup to enterprise.

Who you are

• Experienced systems architect: You’ve designed and delivered large-scale, stateful architectures—modeling complex domains, defining clear data schemas, and ensuring end-to-end reliability.

• Distributed-transaction specialist: You’ve implemented robust patterns for coordinating multi-step workflows across disparate services and third-party APIs—handling two-phase commits, sagas, idempotency, and compensating actions to keep data consistent.

• Deep transactional-pipeline expertise: Comfort building reconciled workflows with audit trails and automated recovery, especially when orchestrating financial or compliance-related operations.

• Reliability-first mindset: You bake in observability (metrics, logs, alerts), fault tolerance, and graceful degradation from day one.

• Scalability & performance focus: You understand caching, queueing, rate-limiting, and have tuned systems to handle rapid growth without sacrificing latency or correctness.

• Strategic thinker & communicator: You break down complex trade-offs into clear plans, document your designs, and keep cross-functional stakeholders aligned.

• Bias toward action & high standards: You ship prototypes quickly, iterate based on real feedback, and insist on production-ready quality in every release.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and equity

• Comprehensive benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) - For US employee roles only

• Unlimited PTO and sick leave

• Remote work

• 2-4 off-sites per year

Note for US Roles: We do not provide visa sponsorship. You must be authorized to work in the U.S.