Senior Backend Engineer – Scalable Infra & APIs

Kira; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

DoorDash lunch

Job summary

Kira is a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier Venture Capital funds, shaping how AI is used to transform education. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to own core backend systems and infrastructure, with strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and tooling.

You’ll collaborate with product teams to ship end-to-end features from design through rollout. The role is full-time, based in SF or NYC with in-person work 4 days a week.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong backend experience (Kotlin, Python, Go, Rust, Scala) with willingness to ramp up on Kira’s stack.
• Own technical decisions with minimal guidance in ambiguous environments.
• Hands-on experience operating production systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Experience designing APIs, working with relational databases (MySQL), and shipping complex systems.
• 2+ years mentoring and/or managing junior engineers.
• Familiarity with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and reliable deployment practices.
• Clear written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment with changing priorities.
• A positive, can-do attitude. Able to overcome ambiguity.
• Impeccable attention to detail.
• (Preferred) Extensive frontend experience (React, TypeScript).
• (Preferred) Experience with integrating LLM-backed services.

Responsibilities

• Ship impactful, end-to-end features that improve student and teacher experiences.
• Help set and evolve technical direction, translating business goals into pragmatic technical plans.
• Improve product and engineering foundations, including code quality, observability, CI/CD, and developer tooling.
• Own operational excellence, addressing performance, scalability, security, reliability, and incident response.
• Partner closely with product managers and designers on UX, interaction design, and execution.
• Participate across the full lifecycle: prototyping, testing, rollout, and ongoing support.
• Provide technical leadership through design discussions, code reviews, and mentorship.

Skills

Mentoring experience

API design

Strong communication

Cloud operations

Observability/CI-CD

Frontend familiarity

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Kotlin

Python

Go

Rust

Scala

AWS

MySQL/PostgreSQL

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Kira is a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier Venture Capital funds, shaping how AI is used to transform education. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to own core backend systems and infrastructure, with strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and tooling.

You’ll collaborate with product teams to ship end-to-end features from design through rollout. The role is full-time, based in SF or NYC with in-person work 4 days a week.