Senior Backend Engineer - Fynn (AI Credit Coach)

Kikoff•San Francisco, CA

3d•$244,000 - $292,000

About The Position

Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company focused on empowering individuals to achieve financial security. With significant revenue growth and a unicorn valuation, Kikoff offers products that help millions build credit, access liquidity, and save money. The company is scaling rapidly and seeks individuals who want to build meaningful products with real customer impact. This role is for the Fynn (AI Credit Coach) product, which serves as the intelligence layer of Kikoff's ecosystem. Fynn analyzes user credit reports and financial profiles to provide personalized advice, guide users to relevant tools, and facilitate actions like credit building and AI-powered debt negotiation. Fynn is already a highly utilized feature, with early engagement indicating strong demand for actionable guidance. Debt is a primary user concern, and Fynn's voice agent can negotiate with creditors on the user's behalf. Users who engage with Fynn tend to progress faster in their credit journey. The company is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to evolve Fynn from a reactive assistant to a proactive coach that anticipates user needs and prevents financial mistakes. The role involves owning backend systems for personalization, orchestrating LLM and agent workflows, and scaling these systems to manage millions of conversations and financial progress in a regulated environment where accuracy and trust are paramount.

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
Comfort building in an environment where correctness, latency, and user trust all matter at once

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience building LLM-powered products such as RAG, agentic/tool-calling workflows, prompt engineering, or eval frameworks
Experience working within a client-server architecture, even if only on one side of it (backend services, the client/mobile app, or the API contract between them)
Experience with AI quality and safety systems: automated evaluation, guardrails, and testing model/prompt changes before release
Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, credit bureau data)
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 the core backend systems behind Fynn: the conversational AI layer, personalization engine, and the orchestration that connects users to Kikoff's suite of tools and marketplace offerings.
Build LLM-powered workflows and agents, integrating model providers, retrieval over user credit and financial data, tool-calling, and the AI Debt Negotiation voice agent into reliable, production-grade pipelines.
Own the evaluation and quality infrastructure that lets us ship safely, including automated scorers across accuracy, tone, compliance, and privacy, plus the tooling to test prompt and model changes before they reach users.
Turn insight into action at scale, building the systems that detect financial challenges in a user's profile and surface tailored, timely next steps across the user lifecycle.
Integrate with internal services and third-party providers such as credit bureau data, financial profiles, and Kikoff's product surfaces, building robust APIs and data pipelines that maintain accuracy and consistency for millions of users.
Enhance observability and reliability, introducing monitoring, alerting, latency management, and fault tolerance into AI-critical systems where a wrong answer carries real consequences.
Help evolve Fynn from reactive to proactive, building the foundations for anticipatory guidance that reaches users at the right moment.
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, compliance, and security.