Senior Backend Engineer - Grant Growth Team

Kikoff • San Francisco, CA

2d • $244,000 - $292,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth FinTech unicorn serving millions of people, many of whom are building credit or navigating life paycheck to paycheck. With innovative technology and AI, we simplify credit building, reduce debt, and expand access to financial opportunities to those who need them the most. Founded in 2019, Kikoff is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier VC investors and NBA star Stephen Curry.
Why Kikoff:
This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.
On Grant, we’re helping with the single most painful, important, and urgent problem of consumer finance - short term liquidity needs. IE, how do you pay for gas to get to your job, pay for unexpected emergencies, make ends meet with groceries before your next paycheck lands. We solve this real world pain point by providing fast, fair access to earned wages- without the predatory fees common in the industry. Our business model is profitable while maintaining customer-first values, and we're experiencing rapid user growth as we scale our impact.
Grant has recently launched to the general public at the very start of 2025 and has since scaled from thousands to hundreds of thousands of active subscribers and on track to disburse and recollect its first billion dollars. Looking toward 2026 we expect to continue scaling up towards billions of dollars per year disbursed to a million plus active subscribers.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Grant Growth team who is excited to build net new zero to one product experiences and scale existing offerings to the level to support our next phase of hyper growth! You’ll be working on critical features / offerings that bring users coming back and continually find more value in Grant.

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

Nice To Haves

• 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

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.
• You'll work closely with our product, data science, and operations teams to ship features that directly impact our customers' financial wellbeing while maintaining the highest standards of reliability and security.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed