Senior Backend Engineer - Fynn (AI Credit Coach)

About the role

Kikoff is a fintech company focused on empowering millions of people to achieve financial security. We are scaling rapidly and are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team.

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.
• Evaluate and quality infrastructure that lets us ship safely, including automated scorers across accuracy, tone, compliance, and privacy, plus the tooling to test prompt and model changes before they reach users.
• 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.
• Enhance observability and reliability, introducing monitoring, alerting, latency management, and fault tolerance into AI-critical systems where a wrong answer carries real consequences.
• Help evolve Fynn from reactive to proactive, building the foundations for anticipatory guidance that reaches users at the right moment.
• 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.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems.
• Strong systems design skills; you've architected and shipped distributed systems that handle high throughput and maintain data consistency.
• Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar).
• Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning.
• Comfort building in an environment where correctness, latency, and user trust all matter at once.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered products such as RAG, agentic/tool-calling workflows, prompt engineering, or eval frameworks.
• 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).
• 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).

Skills

• Technical Leadership: Ability to own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation and rollout.
• Mentorship: Help level up the team through code reviews, design docs, and technical guidance.
• Impact Focus: Balance technical perfection with pragmatic delivery; you know when to build for scale vs. ship fast.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner effectively with product, data science, and operations to deliver customer value.
• Operational Excellence: Take ownership of the reliability and performance of the systems you build.

Benefits

Base Range $244,000 - $292,000 USD

We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and consider 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.