Senior Backend Engineer

Join an early-stage startup.Accelerate economic opportunity.Join us as a Backend Engineer to build and scale the infrastructure that powers financial access for millions of underserved Americans. This role is for you if you want to own critical systems end-to-end and care deeply about performance, reliability, and scalability. You'll be expected to aggressively leverage AI-assisted development tools to dramatically accelerate your output and maximize impact, all while maintaining strong code quality and system reliability.About usKovo is expanding access to financial tools for people historically excluded from the traditional credit system. We believe everyone deserves the opportunity for economic independence, and we’re building products that help people establish financial identity and unlock opportunity.Over the past three years, Kovo has grown revenue 20x while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency. We rank above the 99th percentile in revenue-per-employee benchmarks, reflecting the leverage of a small, high-performing team.The team combines the ambition of a venture-scale company with the discipline of a profitable business. We reached positive free cash flow early in our lifecycle, allowing us to grow with less dilution and focus on building for the long term.Kovo is backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, along with founders and leaders from Plaid, Column, Ramp, Affirm, Cash App, NerdWallet, Alloy, MoonPay, Uber, Etsy, LendingClub, and more. We’re looking for exceptional people to help us scale the company another 20x and beyond.Why you might be excited about usDirect impact on millions of people’s ability to access creditHigh ownership with minimal bureaucracySpeed, learning, and impact are core valuesWhy you might not be excited about usRoles and priorities evolve quicklySome systems and processes are still being builtThe pace of execution and career growth is intense (not optimized for work-life balance)About the roleEngineering at Kovo is evolving quickly. You will own problems end-to-end, deliver a lot of high-quality code, dig into data, make product decisions, and iterate quickly in production.Our core stack is Node (TypeScript) on AWS and React (NextJS) on Vercel.What you'll doOwn backend systems and infrastructure end-to-end, from design through deployment and scalingBuild performant, reliable APIs and services that power our financial productsDesign and implement scalable architectures on AWS using Node (TypeScript)Make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, scalability, and maintainabilityShip production code frequently while maintaining high quality standardsHelp establish technical patterns and best practices for the engineering teamInterface effectively with product engineers and other stakeholdersAbout youSystems-oriented mindsetCare deeply about performance, reliability, and scalabilityMotivated by ownership and accountability for system outcomesThink critically about architectural decisions and their long-term implicationsThrive in ambiguity and are comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete informationSelf-starter who can work independently and drive projects to completionFocused on shipping high-quality systems fast - however it gets doneComfortable in a high-intensity role and seeking an ambitious workloadStrong sense of ownership and willingness to deliver on tight deadlines. This takes many of our engineers more than 50 hours a weekBelieve software engineering is evolving from writing code to orchestrating AI agents and are excited by this because it force-multiplies your output and impactEmbrace AI generation of code and workflow improvements while maintaining high qualityHate AI slop and care about code quality and system reliabilityRelevant experience5+ years or equivalent depth of experience in professional software engineering, with significant backend focusExperience building and scaling production systems with Node and AWSProficient with TypeScript (bonus)Track record of delivering reliable, performant systems at scale

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