Lead Engineer - Travel FX App

Bjak•Madison, MS

11d•Remote

About The Position

KIRA is expanding its offerings beyond insurance to include spending, saving, investing, exchanging, and traveling, aiming to build tools that empower individuals in Asia to maximize their financial potential. The company believes AI will be instrumental in achieving this goal. KIRA is seeking passionate, driven individuals who are excited about building next-generation financial products and redefining financial applications for a broad audience. The company fosters a global, diverse team with employees from over 20 nationalities, working both remotely and from offices. The Lead Engineer role is a hands-on technical leadership position focused on taking technical ownership of complex products and systems, and elevating the engineering standards within the team. The role involves designing systems, writing and reviewing code, solving challenging engineering problems, mentoring other engineers, and driving initiatives from conception to production. The ideal candidate will be comfortable bridging the gap between architecture and implementation, making sound technical decisions while remaining capable of executing code when necessary.

Requirements

Strong software engineering background with significant experience building and shipping production systems.
Deep technical expertise in one or more areas such as backend, frontend, distributed systems, APIs, databases, or cloud infrastructure.
Strong system design and architecture skills with experience making technical decisions for complex or high-scale systems.
Strong coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on.
Proven experience leading major engineering projects or providing technical leadership to other engineers.
Comfortable reviewing code, debugging complex issues, and working directly with production systems.
Able to explain complex technical decisions clearly and influence engineers across teams.
Strong product sense and ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
Able to work fast with ambiguity and take ownership from problem definition through production.
Strong judgment around when to move quickly, when to simplify, and when deeper engineering investment is required.
Strong English communication is required.

Nice To Haves

Engineers who want a leadership title but no longer want to write or review code.
People who only want to work within one narrow technical area.
Engineers who wait for complete specifications before starting.
Candidates who over-engineer solutions when a simpler approach would achieve the outcome.
Engineers who focus only on implementation without understanding the product or business problem.
People who avoid production incidents, difficult debugging, or ownership after release.
Candidates who make vague claims about technical leadership without being able to explain what they personally designed, built, shipped, or scaled.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design and execution of major products, features, and engineering initiatives.
Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems across backend, frontend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.
Stay hands-on with engineering through coding, prototyping, code reviews, debugging, and production problem-solving.
Make architecture decisions and technical trade-offs that balance speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
Break down ambiguous product and technical problems into clear engineering solutions and execution plans.
Set a high bar for code quality, system design, testing, security, observability, and production reliability.
Review technical designs and code from other engineers and provide clear, actionable feedback.
Mentor engineers and help strengthen technical capability across the team.
Identify technical risks, bottlenecks, and architectural weaknesses before they become larger problems.
Work closely with engineering, product, design, and AI teams to ship high-quality products quickly.
Improve engineering tooling, development practices, and automation to increase team velocity.
Own systems beyond release, including monitoring production, investigating incidents, resolving root causes, and continuously improving reliability.