Senior Product Engineer

📋 Description

• • Kovo Credit Inc. is seeking a Senior Product Engineer to join their early-stage startup, focused on accelerating economic opportunity for millions of underserved Americans. This pivotal role offers broad ownership and the chance to significantly influence product development, not just its technical execution. You will be instrumental in building and scaling products that directly impact financial inclusion, making this a unique opportunity for a driven engineer to contribute to a mission-driven company.
• • As a Senior Product Engineer, your day-to-day responsibilities will be dynamic and encompass the full product lifecycle. You will own product areas end-to-end, from identifying and shaping the problems the team tackles to devising and implementing the solutions. This often involves starting from a blank slate, requiring you to define the problem space and then iterate rapidly based on data and user feedback. A significant part of your role will be making pragmatic, data-driven tradeoffs between development speed, code quality, user experience, and long-term scalability. You will be expected to develop and clearly communicate product opinions, backing them with evidence gathered from data, business context, and direct customer input. Furthermore, you will play a key role in establishing best practices, patterns, and norms for product-oriented engineering within the team, helping to shape how Kovo builds its future products. You will be expected to aggressively leverage AI-assisted development tools to dramatically accelerate your output and maximize impact, all while maintaining strong code quality and ensuring that the generated code is not merely functional but of high quality.
• • Kovo Credit Inc. is an ambitious, early-stage startup dedicated to expanding access to financial tools for individuals historically excluded from the traditional credit system. The company's core belief is that everyone deserves the opportunity for economic independence, and they are actively building innovative products to help people establish financial identity and unlock new opportunities. Over the past three years, Kovo has demonstrated remarkable growth, achieving a 20x increase in revenue while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency. This efficiency is reflected in their ranking above the 99th percentile in revenue-per-employee benchmarks, a testament to the leverage and high performance of their small team. The company successfully reached positive free cash flow early in its lifecycle, enabling sustainable growth with minimal dilution and a strong focus on long-term product development. Kovo is proudly backed by prominent investors such as Inspired Capital and Homebrew, and supported by founders and leaders from industry-leading companies like Plaid, Column, Ramp, Affirm, Cash App, NerdWallet, Alloy, MoonPay, Uber, Etsy, and LendingClub. The team is actively seeking exceptional individuals to join them in scaling the company another 20x and beyond.
• • In this role, you will have the unparalleled opportunity to learn and grow by taking on significant ownership with minimal bureaucracy, allowing you to see the direct results of your work. You will gain invaluable experience in shaping product strategy and execution from the ground up, making critical decisions that impact millions of users. The fast-paced environment at Kovo prioritizes speed, learning, and impact, offering a steep learning curve and accelerated career growth. You will become proficient in leveraging cutting-edge AI-assisted development tools to enhance productivity and code quality, a skill that is rapidly becoming essential in modern software engineering. By working across both backend and frontend boundaries and contributing to the establishment of engineering best practices, you will develop a holistic understanding of product development and become a well-rounded, highly impactful engineer.
• • The ideal candidate will possess a product-oriented mindset, demonstrating intrinsic curiosity about users, data, the business, and innovative ways of working. They will be motivated by ownership and accountability for outcomes, caring more about shipping high-quality features that meet user needs than simply writing code. This involves the ability to reason about user requirements using a combination of data analysis, business context, and direct customer input. Thriving in ambiguity, the candidate should be comfortable defining success as they go and possess the flexibility to work across both backend and frontend development boundaries. A strong focus on shipping high-quality code rapidly is paramount, achieved through efficient development practices. The candidate should be comfortable in a high-intensity role, seeking an ambitious workload, and demonstrating a strong sense of ownership and willingness to deliver on tight deadlines, understanding that this role may require more than 50 hours per week. A forward-thinking approach to software engineering, embracing the evolution from traditional coding to orchestrating AI agents for multiplied output and impact, is highly valued. While embracing AI for code generation and workflow improvements, a critical eye for maintaining high code quality and a disdain for "AI slop" are essential. Relevant professional experience includes 5+ years or equivalent depth of experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of working with Node.js (TypeScript is a bonus), AWS, and React (NextJS) in production environments. Experience with TypeScript in production is considered a significant advantage.