Senior Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus)

TL;DR

Senior Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus): Owning core backend systems and infrastructure that power critical product workflows with an accent on building reliable, scalable services, improving infrastructure and developer tooling. Focus on operational excellence, addressing performance, scalability, security, reliability, and incident response.

Location: Must work from one of the two locations and come into the office in-person 4 days a week: San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY.

Salary: $170,000 - $230,000

Company

Kira is a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier Venture Capital funds that harnesses transformative AI technologies to make world-class teaching and learning accessible to everyone.

What you will do

• Ship impactful, end-to-end features that improve student and teacher experiences.
• Help set and evolve technical direction, translating business goals into pragmatic technical plans.
• Improve product and engineering foundations, including code quality, observability, CI/CD, and developer tooling.
• Own operational excellence, addressing performance, scalability, security, reliability, and incident response.
• Partner closely with product managers and designers on UX, interaction design, and execution.
• Provide technical leadership through design discussions, code reviews, and mentorship.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong backend experience (e.g., Kotlin, Python, Go, Rust, Scala), with willingness to ramp up on Kira’s stack (Kotlin, Python).
• Ability to own technical decisions and execute with minimal guidance in ambiguous environments.
• Hands-on experience operating production systems and cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS).
• Clear written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to have

• Extensive experience contributing to frontend codebases (e.g., React, TypeScript).
• Experience with integrating LLM-backed services, including API usage, evaluation, and operational considerations.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity.
• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee.
• Flexible PTO policy and company holidays.
• DoorDash credit for lunch daily.