Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus)

About the role

As a Software Engineer at Kira, you will build and own backend services that power critical product workflows, and you will grow quickly while doing it. This role is for an engineer who has already seen a system grow fast and wants more ownership: real design decisions, close collaboration with our VP of Engineering, and mentorship from senior engineers.

This is a product-minded backend role with meaningful work in performance, reliability, and infrastructure. You’ll partner with product and design to ship complete features, contribute across the stack when needed, and have opportunities to meet directly with teachers and students to learn how they use Kira and where we can improve.

This is a full-time position that requires flexibility with work hours and availability outside of regular business hours. We have offices in San Francisco, CA and New York City, NY. We ask that employees work from one of the two locations and come into the office in person 4 days a week (Wednesdays WFH).

What You’ll Do

• Ship impactful, end-to-end features that improve student and teacher experiences
• Own scoped initiatives from design through rollout, making real design decisions with increasing independence
• Build and scale backend services, APIs, and event-driven systems as our traffic and customer base grow rapidly
• Improve engineering foundations, including code quality, observability, testing, and CI/CD
• Take part in operational excellence: performance, reliability, security, and incident response
• Partner closely with product managers and designers on UX, interaction design, and execution
• Use AI coding tools (such as Cursor and Claude Code) as a daily workflow, and review and understand everything they produce
• Contribute to design discussions and code reviews, and grow through mentorship from senior engineers

What We’re Looking for

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience
• Roughly 3-6 years of professional software engineering experience. We will consider standout candidates outside this range
• Strong backend experience in at least one modern language (for example Kotlin, Python, Go, Rust, Scala, Elixir, or Haskell). Kotlin is a nice-to-have, not a requirement, and we expect you to ramp up on Kira's stack (Kotlin, Python)
• Hands-on experience scaling a system through real growth, such as taking users or requests from tens or hundreds of thousands to millions, not only operating mature large-company services
• Experience designing APIs and event-driven systems (queues, messaging), with a practical approach to scalable architecture
• Experience with relational databases (for example MySQL) and operating production systems on cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS)
• A track record of owning a multi-week feature or initiative, including design decisions, and a clear, specific story about its impact
• AI-enabled development as a real daily workflow (Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), with good judgment about when to use AI and when to solve or review code yourself. You can explain, debug, and fix AI-generated code
• Familiarity with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and reliable deployment practices
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain your thinking to technical and non-technical colleagues
• A mix of larger-company and startup experience is a plus, along with comfort in a fast-paced, early-stage environment with changing priorities
• Hunger to grow, a positive can-do attitude, and impeccable attention to detail

Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to frontend codebases (for example React and TypeScript), so you can go full-stack when a feature needs it
• Experience shipping LLM-backed features, including handling latency, cost, model failures, and fallbacks.
• Experience building or maintaining AI evaluations, including representative datasets, task-specific quality checks, and regression tests for prompt or model changes.
• Experience building workflows where models call tools or coordinate multiple steps, including managing state, retries, timeouts, and human review.
• Experience at a company that grew quickly during your tenure

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $165,000 - $195,000, depending on relevant considerations like professional experience and related skill sets
• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums
• Flexible PTO policy and company holidays
• DoorDash credit for lunch daily
• Wellhub Membership: 100% company-paid access to premium gym networks (Orangetheory, SoulCycle), 60+ wellness apps (Headspace, MyFitnessPal, Apple Fitness+), and 1:1 coaching sessions spanning fitness, mental health, nutrition, and sleep
• 401(k) matching
• Dog friendly office