Hybrid Senior Software Engineer – Grant Growth Team

at Kikoff

• Job title: Senior Software Engineer – Grant Growth Team
• 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 Software Engineer building backend systems for growth at Kikoff. Designing and implementing core systems that facilitate user retention and financial services.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement core backend systems for supporting growth features that hundreds of thousands of users use weekly - scaling to handle millions monthly.
• Level up product experience throughout the user lifecycle. From onboarding to advancing to account closure. You’ll own and iterate on these experience
• Integrate with third-party financial service providers and internal services, building robust APIs and data pipelines that ensure accuracy and consistency at scale - scaling up to billions of dollars per year
• Experiment and iterate on new user offerings and existing experience to improve retention and user value.
• Contribute across the stack on user-facing experiences tied to core subscription payments and related features — from checkout and repayment flows to account management.
• Enhance observability and reliability, introducing monitoring, alerting, and fault tolerance into user-critical systems.
• Support adjacent product areas, contributing to shared systems and features beyond grant as part of a cross-functional engineering org.

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
• Track record of making infrastructure decisions that balance technical excellence with business pragmatism
• Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar)
• Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning
• Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, real-time payments)
• Background in fintech, payments, or lending infrastructure
• Technical Leadership: Ability to own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation and rollout
• Mentorship: Help level up the team through code reviews, design docs, and technical guidance
• Impact Focus: Balance technical perfection with pragmatic delivery - you know when to build for scale vs. ship fast
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner effectively with product, data science, and operations to deliver customer value
• Operational Excellence: Take ownership of the reliability and performance of the systems you build.

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