At Sequin (YC S21), we’re thrilled to announce we’re hiring our first engineers (Apply here!) to join us in revolutionizing women’s finances, beginning with the first debit card that builds credit for women with rewards where we spend.

There’s been a significant amount of interest in the role, with just one problem — our pipeline has been mostly men (s/o Elpha!). While we genuinely appreciate the interest (and if the right person for the role ends up being a mission-driven man, like my incredible co-founder/CTO Mark Thomas, we’re all for it), our pipeline isn’t representative of our mission to level the financial playing field — or our vision of the world we’re building towards.

Fighting the trope of the all-male Silicon Valley founding team.

One of my personal missions as a founder is to lead by example — as an immigrant woman founder in a male-dominated fintech and venture-backed space, the associated challenges are worth it when I hear other women say they feel more confident taking risks after hearing my story.

As a key operating tenet since I founded Sequin, I haven’t let “pipeline issues” be an excuse to settle; rather they have been an impetus to try harder. Specifically, to try harder to build the reality that I want to live in — one where more women who look like me are in positions of power, and where more women feel empowered to achieve their financial goals.

This tenet rang true the first time I fundraised a pre-seed round for Sequin and put in the work to find women venture capitalists to invest in our company mission (92% of our cap table identifies as women, like the women of the Schwab Family and IDEO— a flipped cap table!). And, this commitment to ignore pipeline issues has remained true as we’ve centered women in every step of our product development at Sequin, through Y Combinator’s Summer 21 batch and larger rounds of funding (check out our $5.7M seed round in Forbes!).

We’re hiring a mission-driven, full-stack engineer!

Now that my co-founder Mark and I are building our team, we are coming across the same challenge we’ve always faced in a male-dominated world. Do we take the easy way out and write off pipeline issues as a reason behind the Silicon Valley trope of an all-male founding team?

If our past actions are any predictor of our future intentions, it’s no surprise that we’re scouring our networks to expand our pipeline with women engineers to fill this incredible opportunity that has the potential to change women’s financial realities forever.

To my network, if you or anyone you know is a mission-driven full-stack engineer with 1–3+ years of experience, we want to meet you. Apply here!

I’ve consistently heard from women — at disproportionate rates than men — that you may not feel confident in your own abilities to contribute to a fintech team with unicorn potential.

I want to assure you that Mark and I have two decades of fintech experience across Visa & PayPal and are committed to mentoring you with kindness and optimism.

All we ask is that you give this role everything you have. We’ll take care of the rest.

Sincerely,

Vrinda Gupta

Co-Founder & CEO of Sequin Financial Inc.