--- title: 'Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Kikoff' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-infrastructure-engineer-kikoff-san-francisco-3260rkkcw562' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-11' --- # Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Kikoff - **Company:** Kikoff - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $307k–$352k - **Posted:** 2026-08-13 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/kikoff/jobs/4288071009 ## 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. ## About the Role Kikoff's infrastructure team builds the systems that enable engineering teams to move quickly without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost discipline. The team owns five connected areas: Observability, Developer Productivity, Compute Infrastructure, Networking and Storage, and Data Infrastructure. As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will own high-leverage infrastructure problems from design through production operation and help run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers. You will build internal products and paved paths that turn ambiguous problems into durable systems. Your work should improve delivery speed and reliability, reduce cost, and reduce the amount of operational work product teams carry. This is a hands-on Staff IC role. You will foster relationships, write code, review designs, make architecture decisions, lead through incidents, and help engineers solve problems outside the runbook. You will have a primary area of depth and enough range to follow production problems across infrastructure boundaries. AI is increasing the amount of code and change moving through our systems. You will help build a platform that can absorb that growth without creating more incidents, unsustainable cost, or a team that depends on heroics. In This Role, You Will Build and Own Critical Platform Systems - Design and implement self-service infrastructure on AWS using reusable code and infrastructure-as-code patterns. We use Pulumi, HCL, and TypeScript heavily. The company runs on Ruby. - Own the systems you build in production, including reliability, security, capacity, cost, upgrades, incidents, and recovery. - Give critical services an SLO, actionable alerts, a useful dashboard, a runbook, and a tested recovery path. - Automate recurring operational work and eliminate failure-prone manual steps rather than allowing them to become permanent processes. Run Infrastructure as a Product - Work directly with engineers to turn recurring friction into paved paths, self-service tools, and automated workflows that are faster and safer than one-off solutions. - Measure outcomes for internal customers through adoption, developer feedback, delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load. - Use the fastest responsible path when a team is blocked, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability. Set Technical Direction - Set technical direction for ambiguous infrastructure work, then carry it from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and production ownership. - Make clear trade-offs among delivery speed, reliability, security, cost, and long-term operational complexity. - Partner across Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Product Engineering to build security and compliance controls into normal engineering workflows. Raise the Engineering Bar - Review code and designs, challenge weak assumptions, help other engineers make better technical decisions, and uphold high standards for reliability, testing, safe deployments, security, and maintainability. - Lead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and ensure the system is better after service is restored. - Create standards, reusable patterns, and durable documentation that improve how teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software. You Have - 7+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of Staff-level technical impact. - Sustained ownership of a consequential production system. You have operated what you built, handled incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and improved the system afterward. - Strong coding skills in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, or a similar language. You can build production software, not only configure tools. - Production experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, and the security boundaries around them. - Experienced generalist judgment. You have depth in at least one infrastructure domain and can learn quickly across adjacent ones. - A track record of building platform capabilities that engineers adopted because they solved real problems and were easier to use than one-off alternatives. - Clear, direct communication. You can explain a technical decision, its evidence, and its tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical partners. ## Nice to Have - Deep experience in one or more of observability, developer productivity, cloud compute, networking, storage, data infrastructure, or security. - Experience with Pulumi and TypeScript on AWS, including ECS or Fargate, k8s, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, and IAM. - Experience building and operating an early-stage platform through rapid growth in fintech or another regulated environment. ## What We're Like Scrappy. We move quickly and build what we need. We do not cut corners when they matter, and we do not over-engineer when they do not. Risk-oriented. We make tradeoffs deliberately. A mature team knows the difference between a risk worth taking and one that is not. Data-obsessed. We look at the data, understand the mechanics behind it, and use that evidence to make better decisions. Humble. We know the company has benefited from timing, circumstance, and the right people showing up. We are grateful, and we do not take it for granted. 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/) ## Other roles at Kikoff - [Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketer-kikoff-san-francisco-z6qfyqyv9v1h) — San Francisco, CA - [Accounting Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/accounting-manager-kikoff-san-francisco-35fan94cvwqg) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Mobile Engineer – Kikoff Main App](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mobile-engineer-kikoff-main-app-kikoff-san-francisco-0wzv43tw9hbe) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Security Engineer, Data Security](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-security-engineer-data-security-kikoff-san-francisco-s22nr407yw3d) — San Francisco, CA - [Staff Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-machine-learning-engineer-kikoff-san-francisco-ptnbmmfqvgvf) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Recent Grad](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-recent-grad-kikoff-san-francisco-nz2587cvgzsn) — San Francisco, CA - [Staff Engineer - Web Applications](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-engineer-web-applications-kikoff-san-francisco-b1se2c71h5kj) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Program Manager, Customer Experience](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-program-manager-customer-experience-kikoff-san-francisco-ffsx4x3hfeet) — San Francisco, CA - [Creative Operations Short Term Employee](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-operations-short-term-employee-kikoff-san-francisco-7fsvaxteh883) — San Francisco, CA - [Director, Securities & Corporate Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/director-securities-corporate-counsel-kikoff-san-francisco-389rtj4q1v7g) — San Francisco, CA