Founding Engineer

Kita (YC W26); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity

Relocation support

Health coverage

International travel

Offsites

Gym sessions

Good food

Job summary

Kita in San Francisco builds underwriting systems that scale access to credit across markets. You will implement agentic workflows, integrate with loan origination stacks, and harden systems to withstand enterprise demand and regulatory scrutiny.

You’ll work with Python and TypeScript, handle end-to-end ML-driven decisions, and partner with founders to shape what gets shipped next. This role emphasizes deep technical craft and clear results in ambiguity.

Qualifications

• Production experience with LLM-based systems and post-deployment considerations.
• Strong backend fundamentals and scalable Python/TypeScript development.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and derive actionable plans.
• Familiarity with security, auditability, and regulatory scrutiny.

Responsibilities

• Build agentic underwriting workflows that collect and analyze borrower data across channels (WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, email).
• Hardening systems for enterprise scale, latency, and cost at volume; handle failures gracefully.
• Ensure traceability and auditability of every number for regulators and auditors.
• Integrations into legacy loan origination systems and core banking stacks.
• Collaborate with founders to decide what to build next and ship quickly.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

LLM systems

Backend fundamentals

Regulatory considerations

Job description

Credit is the difference between a business that grows and one that doesn't, a family that absorbs a shock and one that doesn't. Kita decides who gets assessed fairly and how fast. That is the scale of what you'd be working on: not a metric on a dashboard, but whether capital reaches people it has never reached before, in five countries and counting.

You'll build the agentic systems that do the underwriting work, harden them until they hold up under enterprise volume and regulatory scrutiny, and work directly with the founders on what gets built next.

What you'll work on

Agentic workflows that run the full assessment: collecting a borrower's file across WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, and email, chasing what's missing, reconciling what doesn't match, running the financial analysis, and producing a decision-ready assessment

Hardening. Getting these systems from working to reliable is most of the job: evals, failure modes, latency and cost at volume, graceful degradation when a model or an upstream system misbehaves

Auditability and traceability. Every number we return has to trace back to its source and survive a regulator, an auditor, and a credit committee. This constraint shapes the architecture, it isn't bolted on

Security. Our customers are regulated lenders handling borrower data. You'll build to that bar and help us clear the reviews that come with it

Integrations into loan origination systems and core banking stacks, some of them decades old

What we're looking for

You go deep. You read the papers, you build the thing, and you're usually a step ahead of where the field was last month

You research and build in the same motion. New capability lands, you've already tested whether it changes what we should ship

Genuinely curious about the whole company. Our engineers sit in on sales calls, read customer contracts, and work closely with our customers to understand how they make decisions

You operate clearly in ambiguity. Not tolerate it, operate in it: you can take a vague problem, find the real constraint, and come back with a plan

Production experience with LLM-based systems and the aftermath, including hallucinations, drift, evals, versioning, and cost

Strong backend fundamentals. Python and TypeScript are our daily drivers, but how you think matters more than what you've used

All in on the mission. Expanding access to credit globally is the reason this job exists

We don't have a years-of-experience requirement. Show us what you've built.

Nice to have

Fintech, lending, payments, or other regulated‑industry work

Computer vision on messy real‑world documents

Why this one

Very few engineering jobs move real capital to real people at this scale. You'll also see it: our team travels to the markets we serve, and you'll sit with the credit officers in Manila and Mexico City using what you shipped.

Benefits: competitive salary and meaningful equity, relocation support, health coverage, international travel across our markets, offsites, team gym sessions, and a lot of good food.