Hybrid Senior Backend Engineer – Grant Core

at Kikoff

• Job title: Senior Backend Engineer – Grant Core
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $200,000 - $260,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Distributed Systems
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Senior Backend Engineer developing multi-rail payment systems at Kikoff. Leading backend services design and optimization to support high transaction volumes and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Own and scale our multi-rail payment systems (ACH, RTP, card networks) to handle transaction volume while maintaining 99.99% reliability
• Design and build scalable backend services that can handle millions of transactions with low latency and high throughput
• Optimize our Sidekiq job infrastructure to efficiently process complex workflows for underwriting, collections, and payment distribution
• Lead architectural decisions for our core financial systems, balancing speed, reliability, and cost as we scale
• Build robust data pipelines that power our ML models and real-time decision engines

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems
• Strong systems design skills - you've architected and shipped distributed systems that handle high throughput and maintain data consistency
• Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar)
• Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage - Kikoff covers the full cost of health insurance for the employee!
• Meaningful equity in the form of RSU's
• Flexible vacation policy to help you recharge
• Competitive pay based on experience consisting of base + equity + benefits