---
title: 'Staff Engineer - Web Applications at Kikoff'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-engineer-web-applications-kikoff-san-francisco-b1se2c71h5kj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Staff Engineer - Web Applications at Kikoff

- **Company:** Kikoff
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $307k–$352k
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/kikoff/jobs/4390878009

## Job description

Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. 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. We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.

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. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.

We're looking for a Staff Frontend Engineer to raise the technical bar for our company-wide web product surfaces, spanning Kikoff, Grant, and the products we build next, all in service of our mission to help millions of Americans.

This role goes beyond shipping features. You'll own the health, performance, and architecture of the frontend systems that serve our traffic at scale every day. You'll set technical direction, drive the frontend infrastructure roadmap, and treat performance as a product feature. Like everyone here, you'll work hand-in-hand with PMs, designers, data scientists, and other engineers to make sure what we ship is fast, reliable, and moves the needle in a meaningful, measurable way.

What you'll be doing:

- Own the technical strategy and architecture of Kikoff's company-wide web frontend across Kikoff, Grant, and future products, including component systems, state management, rendering strategy, routing, and build/deploy pipelines
- Own performance tuning for our highest-traffic surfaces: instrumentation, performance budgets, profiling, and optimization of Core Web Vitals, load times, and runtime responsiveness
- Lead frontend infrastructure work (tooling, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, testing, developer experience) so that every engineer can ship high quality, performant UI by default
- Build and evolve the shared UI components and libraries that product teams build on, and set frontend standards and code review practices across the org
- Lead complex, cross-team projects that measurably improve the reliability, responsiveness, and polish of our product
- Mentor engineers across the team and raise the technical bar

Requirements:

- B.A. / B.S. / M.S. or strong self-taught fundamentals in computer science
- 8+ years of industry experience, with a track record of leading large consumer facing web applications across multiple teams
- Experience building and operating consumer websites at scale, serving hundreds of thousands to millions of users, where performance and reliability directly affect the business
- Deep hands-on experience with frontend performance tuning: profiling, instrumentation, bundle optimization, rendering performance, caching/CDN strategy, and performance budgets
- Experience owning frontend infrastructure: build systems, design systems, observability, testing frameworks, and developer tooling that make other engineers more productive
- Hands-on and Deep experience with React in production
- A record of driving measurable improvements in quality and performance (load times, error rates, test coverage, reliability)
- Ability to influence technical direction and get alignment across teams without direct authority
- Ability to analyze data and distill information for business purposes
- Desire to form strong professional bonds with startup-forward coworkers

Base Range $307,000—$352,000 USD

## Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

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](https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights_10_20.pdf).

## About Kikoff

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Kikoff is a personal financial technology company that builds credit, manages debt, and unlocks financial opportunity for underserved consumers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Cynthia Chen (CEO & Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Consumer Fintech, Credit Building, Personal Finance
- **Target customers**: B2C – individuals seeking to build or improve credit scores, manage debt, and access affordable financial services.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: Empowering everyone to achieve financial security, no matter where they’re starting from.

## Products & Services
- **Credit Building ($5/month)**: A credit-builder loan that reports to major credit bureaus with no interest and no hidden fees.
- **Rent & Bill Reporting**: Reports on-time rent and utility payments to credit bureaus to help users build credit from everyday bills.
- **Secured Credit Card**: A card designed to help users establish or rebuild credit responsibly.
- **AI-Powered Debt Negotiation**: Complimentary service that uses AI to negotiate debt reductions for users (over $8M in debt relief since 2024).
- **Identity Theft Protection**: Monitoring and alerts for identity fraud.
- **Fynn (AI Credit Coach)**: Launched in 2026, an AI-powered coach providing personalised financial guidance.
- **Grant & Catch**: Additional products in the ecosystem (likely focused on grants and savings/catch-up features).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (unicorn status inferred from growth and investor profile).
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue surpassed **$300M** in 2025, more than doubling year over year while maintaining profitability since 2023.
- **Total Raised**: $42.5M (Series C)
- **Notable Investors**: Core Innovation Capital, Coatue, Lightspeed, Portage, Notable Capital (and 12+ others)
- **Growth Signals**: Profitable since 2023; reached $300M+ revenue in <7 years; 1M+ customers; 80M+ credit points boosted; 30K+ mortgages and 433K+ auto loans opened after using Kikoff; appointed CFO John Kaelle and CLO Robert Mahnke in 2026, signalling public-market readiness.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Radically affordable pricing** ($5/month for credit building vs. industry $300+) removes barriers for low-income users.
- **AI-first approach** for debt negotiation and credit coaching creates scalable, personalised solutions.
- **Proprietary technology** builds the entire stack in-house, lowering costs and enabling faster iteration.
- **Strong unit economics** and profitability demonstrate operational discipline uncommon at this growth stage.

## Strategic Focus
- **Continued product expansion** – adding new financial tools (Grant, Catch, Fynn) to create a one-tap financial security platform.
- **Deepening leadership bench** with IPO-experienced executives to prepare for future public listing.
- **Investing in AI and automation** to replace legacy systems and deliver faster, more accessible outcomes.
- **Scaling customer impact** – targeting underserved millions through low-cost, high-access offerings.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture** with real impact: 1M+ customers helped, $8M in debt relief, 80M+ points boosted.
- **Financial stability** – profitable since 2023 with rapid revenue growth, reducing risk of layoffs.
- **Strong values in action**: "Company First, Ego Last", "Act Like an Owner", "Customer Obsessed", "Think in Years, Act Today", "Be Candid & Kind".
- **Comprehensive benefits**: Health benefits, flexible PTO, 401k matching, commuter benefits, fitness benefit, office lunches & dinners.
- **Hybrid/Office setting** in San Francisco (132 Hawthorne Street) – likely a collaborative in-office culture with team meals.
- **Growth trajectory** – team is "growing rapidly" (as stated on careers page), offering ample career advancement opportunities.
- **Engineering and AI focus** – investing heavily in technology, making it an exciting environment for engineers and product builders.

## Sources
1. [about.kikoff.com/careers](https://about.kikoff.com/careers)
2. [about.kikoff.com/company](https://about.kikoff.com/company)
3. [cbinsights.com/company/kikoff](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/kikoff)
4. [businesswire.com](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260421425245/en/)

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