Kikoff
Senior Backend Engineer - Fynn (AI Credit Coach)
San Francisco · Senior
Sponsorship not specified$244k-$292kDetected 23 days ago
Distributed SystemsBackend DevelopmentCode ReviewData EngineeringData ScienceLLMsRAGNegotiationValuationLeadershipCommunicationCollaborationMentoring
About the role
- Why Kikoff: This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products.
- About Fynn (AI Credit Coach) Fynn is Kikoff's AI credit coach, and the intelligence layer across our entire ecosystem.
- Fynn is already one of the most-used surfaces in the Kikoff app, and early engagement shows real demand for guidance people can actually act on.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement the core backend systems behind Fynn: the conversational AI layer, personalization engine, and the orchestration that connects users to Kikoff's suite of tools and marketplace offerings.
- Build LLM-powered workflows and agents, integrating model providers, retrieval over user credit and financial data, tool-calling, and the AI Debt Negotiation voice agent into reliable, production-grade pipelines.
- Turn insight into action at scale, building the systems that detect financial challenges in a user's profile and surface tailored, timely next steps across the user lifecycle.
- Integrate with internal services and third-party providers such as credit bureau data, financial profiles, and Kikoff's product surfaces, building robust APIs and data pipelines that maintain accuracy and consistency for millions of users.
- Help evolve Fynn from reactive to proactive, building the foundations for anticipatory guidance that reaches users at the right moment.
- With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money.
- Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.
- Help level up the team through code reviews, design docs, and technical guidance
- Partner effectively with product, data science, and operations to deliver customer value
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems
- Track record of making infrastructure decisions that balance technical excellence with business pragmatism
- Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar)
- Experience working within a client-server architecture, even if only on one side of it (backend services, the client/mobile app, or the API contract between them)
- Ideal Candidate Also Has
- Experience with AI quality and safety systems: automated evaluation, guardrails, and testing model/prompt changes before release
- Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, credit bureau data)
Nice to have
- Enhance observability and reliability, introducing monitoring, alerting, latency management, and fault tolerance into AI-critical systems where a wrong answer carries real consequences.
Skills
- About Fynn (AI Credit Coach)
- Fynn is Kikoff's AI credit coach, and the intelligence layer across our entire ecosystem.
- Read more about Fynn's launch and early impact
- What You'll Be Doing
Compensation
- You'll build the intelligence layer at the center of Kikoff, the product that increasingly defines how millions of users experience their financial journey.
- Your work directly improves the financial lives of real customers. Not nice-to-haves, but measurable, life-changing outcomes.
- AI is at the core of the company, not a side project. You'll work at the frontier of applied LLM systems in a real, regulated, high-stakes consumer product.
- Greenfield opportunities to architect new systems as Fynn evolves from reactive assistant to proactive coach.
- Small, high-impact team where your contributions are immediately visible.
Benefits
- Work closely with our product, data science, and operations teams to ship features that directly impact our customers' financial wellbeing while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, compliance, and security.
Company info
- Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security.
Equal opportunity
- Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.
- We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
- Please reference the following for more information.
Visa & Work Authorization
- in, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class
This listing is sourced directly from Kikoff's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.