Starlight careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Starlight's careers materials list its investors as Caffeinated Capital, Commerce Ventures, TruStage Ventures, Garuda Ventures and mission-driven angels; round sizes have not been published. Two investments have public stories: Commerce Ventures awarded Starlight a $100,000 uncapped SAFE for winning the America's Got Access pitch competition at Money20/20 in 2023, and in November 2025 One Washington Financial, the investment arm of WSECU, made a strategic investment alongside which Starlight formed its CUSO.

Starlight (get-starlight.com) builds the infrastructure layer that connects financial institutions, mainly credit unions, to government benefits. More than $100 billion in benefits goes unclaimed in the US every year, not because people do not qualify but because the system is fragmented and hard to navigate. Starlight's platform checks each member's eligibility for local, state and federal programs (SNAP, LIHEAP and other utility support, Medicaid, childcare subsidies, unemployment insurance, tax credits), guides them through the application, and then routes them back into credit union products. The company is a Public Benefit Corporation and, since late 2025, also a CUSO (Credit Union Service Organization).

It is a B2B2C business with real distribution: as of its October 2026 job description Starlight partners with 15+ financial institutions, reaches over 700,000 members, and reports finding over $15 million for the households it serves through 2025. The platform is live in all 50 states, and published case studies include St. Louis Community Credit Union ($4.1M unlocked in its annual impact report) and Metro Credit Union in New England, which rolled Starlight out after matching over $2M in a pilot. Founded in New York in 2022, the company was started by ex-Google and ex-LinkedIn operators.

Shreenath Regunathan, Founder and CEO. Spent a decade at Google building data, machine learning and cloud solutions before starting Starlight in New York in 2022. He has led the company through its Money20/20 pitch win, its expansion to all 50 states, and the November 2025 formation of its CUSO following One Washington Financial's strategic investment.

Catherine Xu, Co-founder. Studied computer science at Stanford and worked at LinkedIn, where she launched a new ad format and monetization vertical, before co-founding Starlight. Per her LinkedIn she served as co-CEO from 2022 to January 2025, during which the company raised $5M, grew to 7-figure ARR and reached 700K+ users.

The open role is a founding senior engineering seat on an intentionally small team: you would own major parts of the core stack, from the eligibility and application engine that tracks program state for hundreds of thousands of households, to versioned partner APIs and SSO for bank integrations, to early AI-native agents that navigate benefits systems on behalf of households. The JD is explicit that you will not inherit a finished roadmap; you help build it, along with the engineering culture and technical direction.

Compensation is published: $160K to $180K plus equity, depending on experience, with unlimited PTO, health, dental and vision insurance, and internet, fitness, meal, and learning and development stipends. The head of engineering, who posted the role on Hacker News in September 2026, says he is actively involved in hiring and wants this hire to help figure out what an "AI-first" engineering organization actually means, with experimentation encouraged but no token quotas or AI mandates.

Starlight describes itself as mission-driven and product-focused: modernizing the social safety net so that a credit union member who qualifies for assistance actually receives it. The team's published background spans fintech, policy and mission-driven technology, with experience from Google, the credit union movement and government reform. Credit union executives quoted on the site frame the product as an extension of the industry's "people helping people" ethos.

Engineering culture, per the October 2026 job description, aims for product decisions "earned by evidence, not argument": the team is building experimentation infrastructure (ship, measure, learn, repeat), deploys to production on every merge via GitHub Actions, and wants engineers who run autonomously on loosely scoped problems. The company describes itself as pragmatic, not dogmatic, about tools, and part of its stated thesis is that AI should let a small team punch far above its weight.

As of October 2026 there is one published opening, Senior Engineer (Full Stack): AI + Impact, listed at https://www.get-starlight.com/careers with the full job description hosted on Notion. It asks for 5 to 7+ years of engineering experience with foundational systems shipped to production, comfort across the stack, and curiosity about AI agents and applied ML; depth in Rails, TypeScript/Next.js or cloud infrastructure is a plus rather than a requirement. Applications go through a short form linked from the JD, and the company says every application is reviewed by a human.

The role is remote within the US with New York City preferred; remote hires travel to NYC one to two weeks per quarter. The stack is Ruby on Rails 8 (API-only) on PostgreSQL (Aurora) with Postgres-backed background jobs, TypeScript and Next.js with React 19 across multiple apps in a shared monorepo, AWS (ECS, Aurora, S3, SQS, Lambda) fully managed with Terraform, Datadog for observability and PostHog for analytics and feature flags.