Technical Lead, SWE

The Role

As Technical Lead, you'll own the technical direction of the systems behind Kastle's real-time AI voice and compliance agents, and lead the engineers who build them. You'll stay hands-on in the code while setting architecture, raising the engineering bar, and turning ambitious product goals into reliable systems running inside bank environments.

This is a player-coach role: roughly half your time writing and reviewing code, half designing systems, mentoring, and partnering with product, forward-deployed engineering, and customers.

What You'll Do

• Set technical direction. Own the architecture of the core platform powering real-time AI voice and compliance workflows, and make the key build-vs-buy and design calls.
• Lead and grow the team. Mentor engineers (this is a player coach role), run design and code reviews, and help hire the next wave of engineers as we scale after our Series A.
• Push performance boundaries. Hold the line on sub-700ms voice latency using event-driven architecture and parallel processing.
• Run reliable systems at scale. Deploy, operate, and scale resilient services on Kubernetes and distributed subsystems, with the observability and on-call practices banks expect.
• Build a self-improving AI system. Design the feedback loops that let our agents get better with every customer interaction and human review.
• Ship fast, ship right. Take projects from whiteboard to live production in bank environments, balancing velocity with security and compliance.
• Partner across the company. Work with product, forward-deployed engineers, and customers to turn real lender workflows into technical roadmaps.

What You Bring

• 7+ years building high-performance, real-time backend systems (we work primarily in Python).
• 2+ years leading engineers as a tech lead, staff engineer, or engineering manager, with a track record of shipping large systems through a team.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, reliability, and fault tolerance.
• Excellent database design and performance optimization skills.
• Hands-on experience running production workloads on Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.
• Clear written and verbal communication; you can explain trade-offs to engineers, executives, and bank stakeholders alike.
• A bias for ownership and the ability to figure things out in messy, high-velocity environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience training, designing, or building production AI/ML systems, especially LLM agents or real-time voice (speech-to-text, text-to-speech, telephony).
• Experience in fintech, banking, or other regulated industries (SOC 2, PCI, data privacy).
• Previous startup or founder experience, ideally scaling a team from early stage through Series A/B.

The Interview Process

We respect your time. Our process is short and designed to show how you think and lead:

• 15-min call with our Talent Lead to learn more about the role
• 1-hour live coding session with a Founding Engineer
• 1-hour system design and technical leadership conversation with the CTO
• 1-day onsite with the team