Technical Lead, SWE

Kastle•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Kastle is building AI employees for banks, helping financial institutions scale contact center and compliance operations with autonomous AI agents. The Technical Lead will own the technical direction of the systems behind Kastle’s real-time AI voice and compliance agents and lead the engineers building them. This is a hands-on player-coach role, with approximately half of the time spent writing and reviewing code and the rest spent designing systems, mentoring, and partnering with product, forward-deployed engineering, and customers. The role includes setting architecture and making key build-versus-buy and design decisions; leading, mentoring, and hiring engineers; and delivering reliable, high-performance systems in bank environments. The Technical Lead will help maintain sub-700ms voice latency, operate resilient services on Kubernetes, build feedback loops for continuously improving agents, and take projects from concept through production while balancing speed with security and compliance. The position also partners across the company to translate lender workflows into technical roadmaps.

Requirements

7+ years building high-performance, real-time backend systems; the company primarily works 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, including the ability to explain trade-offs to engineers, executives, and bank stakeholders.
A bias for ownership and the ability to work through messy, high-velocity environments.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and technical direction of the core platform powering real-time AI voice and compliance workflows, including build-versus-buy and design decisions.
Mentor engineers, run design and code reviews, and help hire as the company scales.
Maintain sub-700ms voice latency through event-driven architecture and parallel processing.
Deploy, operate, and scale resilient services on Kubernetes and distributed subsystems, with appropriate observability and on-call practices.
Design feedback loops that improve AI agents through customer interactions and human review.
Take projects from whiteboard through production in bank environments while balancing velocity, security, and compliance.
Partner with product, forward-deployed engineers, and customers to turn lender workflows into technical roadmaps.
Remain hands-on in coding and code review while designing systems and leading the team.