Senior Backend Engineer

📋 Description

• • Join Kovo Credit Inc., an early-stage startup dedicated to accelerating economic opportunity by expanding access to financial tools for millions of underserved Americans. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in building and scaling the robust infrastructure that underpins our mission, empowering individuals historically excluded from traditional credit systems to establish financial identity and unlock new opportunities.
• • This position is ideal for a driven engineer who thrives on end-to-end ownership of critical systems, with a profound commitment to performance, reliability, and scalability. You will be instrumental in shaping the future of our backend architecture and operations.
• • A key aspect of this role involves aggressively leveraging AI-assisted development tools to dramatically accelerate your output and maximize your impact. While embracing these advanced tools, you will maintain an unwavering focus on high code quality and system reliability, ensuring our financial products are both innovative and dependable.
• • Kovo Credit Inc. has demonstrated remarkable growth, achieving a 20x revenue increase over the past three years while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency. Our team operates with the leverage and discipline of a profitable business, having reached positive free cash flow early in our lifecycle. This financial stability allows us to focus on long-term growth and development with minimal dilution.
• • Our engineering culture is characterized by speed, learning, and impact. We foster an environment where engineers are empowered to own problems end-to-end, deliver high-quality code rapidly, delve into data to inform decisions, and iterate quickly in production. The core technology stack includes Node (TypeScript) on AWS for backend services and React (NextJS) on Vercel for the frontend.
• • In this role, you will be responsible for the complete lifecycle of backend systems and infrastructure, from initial design and architecture through deployment, scaling, and ongoing maintenance. You will build performant, reliable APIs and services that are the backbone of our innovative financial products.
• • You will design and implement scalable architectures on AWS, primarily utilizing Node.js with TypeScript. A significant part of your contribution will involve making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed of delivery, system reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability, ensuring a balanced approach to development.
• • You will ship production code frequently, embodying our commitment to rapid iteration while upholding stringent quality standards. This includes actively participating in establishing technical patterns and best practices that will guide the entire engineering team as we grow.
• • Effective interface and collaboration with product engineers and other key stakeholders will be crucial for aligning technical efforts with business objectives and product vision.
• • We are seeking individuals with a strong systems-oriented mindset, who deeply care about performance, reliability, and scalability. You should be motivated by ownership and accountability for system outcomes, and possess the ability to think critically about architectural decisions and their long-term implications.
• • Thriving in ambiguity and comfort in making technical decisions with incomplete information are essential qualities. As a self-starter, you will be expected to work independently and drive projects to successful completion.
• • A core tenet of our engineering philosophy is shipping high-quality systems fast. You should be comfortable in a high-intensity role and actively seeking an ambitious workload. A strong sense of ownership and a willingness to deliver on tight deadlines are paramount; this often requires engineers to dedicate more than 50 hours a week.
• • We believe software engineering is evolving, with AI agents becoming powerful tools for orchestrating development. You should be excited by this evolution, recognizing how it force-multiplies your output and impact. Embracing AI generation of code and workflow improvements while rigorously maintaining high quality is expected. You must have a keen eye for detail and a disdain for "AI slop," ensuring that code quality and system reliability remain paramount.
• • Your experience should reflect a deep understanding of backend systems, with a proven track record of building and scaling production systems using Node.js and AWS. Proficiency in TypeScript is highly desirable, and a history of delivering reliable, performant systems at scale is a must. We are looking for at least 5 years of equivalent depth of experience in professional software engineering, with a significant backend focus.