
Senior Software Engineer, Backend, Infrastructure Focus
Kira
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: San Francisco • California • New York • United States
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Salary
💰 $170,000 - $230,000 per year
Job Level
About the role
- 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
- Participate across the full lifecycle: prototyping, testing, rollout, and ongoing support
- 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)
- Experience designing APIs, working with relational databases (e.g., MySQL), and shipping complex systems
- Familiarity with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and reliable deployment practices
- Clear written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
- Comfort operating in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment with changing priorities
- A positive, can-do attitude. You’re not deterred by minor setbacks and are able to swiftly overcome ambiguity
- Impeccable attention to detail
- (Preferred) Extensive experience contributing to frontend codebases (e.g., React, TypeScript)
- (Preferred) Experience with integrating LLM-backed services, including API usage, evaluation, and operational considerations
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $170,000 - $230,000, depending on relevant considerations like professional experience and related skill sets.
- Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums.
- Flexible PTO policy and company holidays
- Lunch stipend daily
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
KotlinPythonGoRustScalaAPI designrelational databasesMySQLautomated testingCI/CD
Soft Skills
technical leadershipclear communicationproblem-solvingattention to detailadaptabilitymentorshipcollaborationownershipresiliencepositive attitude
Certifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer ScienceMaster’s degree in Computer Science