Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus)

Kira • San Francisco, NY

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Kira is hiring a product-minded backend Software Engineer to build and own services that power critical product workflows. The role offers increasing ownership of design decisions, collaboration with the VP of Engineering, and mentorship from senior engineers. Work includes performance, reliability, and infrastructure, as well as partnering with product and design to ship complete features. Engineers may contribute across the stack and have opportunities to meet with teachers and students to understand their experiences and identify improvements.

This is a full-time position based in Kira’s San Francisco, California, or New York City, New York office. Employees are expected to work in person from one of those offices four days per week, with Wednesdays as work-from-home days. The role requires flexibility in work hours and availability outside regular business hours.

Kira offers competitive compensation and equity. The US salary range is $165,000–$195,000, depending on relevant considerations such as experience and skills. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, and life insurance; a medical plan covering 100% of employee premiums; flexible PTO and company holidays; daily DoorDash lunch credit; a company-paid Wellhub membership; 401(k) matching; and dog-friendly offices.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.
• Roughly 3–6 years of professional software engineering experience; standout candidates outside this range will be considered.
• Strong backend experience in at least one modern programming language, such as Kotlin, Python, Go, Rust, Scala, Elixir, or Haskell.
• Hands-on experience scaling a system through real growth, such as growing users or requests from tens or hundreds of thousands to millions.
• Experience designing APIs and event-driven systems, including queues or messaging, with a practical approach to scalable architecture.
• Experience with relational databases, such as MySQL, and operating production systems on cloud infrastructure; AWS is preferred.
• A track record of owning a multi-week feature or initiative, including design decisions, and a clear account of its impact.
• Daily use of AI-enabled development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or similar, with the judgment and ability to 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 ideas to technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, early-stage environment with changing priorities.
• A positive, growth-oriented attitude and strong attention to detail.

Nice To Haves

• Kotlin experience; it is not required, and engineers are expected to ramp up on Kira’s Kotlin and Python stack.
• A mix of larger-company and startup experience.
• Experience contributing to frontend codebases, such as React and TypeScript.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Ship impactful, end-to-end features that improve student and teacher experiences.
• Own scoped initiatives from design through rollout and make design decisions with increasing independence.
• Build and scale backend services, APIs, and event-driven systems as traffic and the customer base grow.
• Improve engineering foundations, including code quality, observability, testing, and CI/CD.
• Contribute to operational excellence across performance, reliability, security, and incident response.
• Partner with product managers and designers on user experience, interaction design, and execution.
• Use AI coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code in daily work, and review and understand their output.
• Contribute to design discussions and code reviews, and develop through mentorship from senior engineers.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• Medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums.
• Flexible PTO policy and company holidays.
• Daily DoorDash credit for lunch.
• Company-paid Wellhub membership, including access to gym networks, wellness apps, and one-to-one coaching.
• 401(k) matching.
• Dog-friendly office.
• Competitive compensation and equity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level