Technical Lead, SWE

present of AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Kastle is seeking a hands-on Senior Backend Lead in San Francisco to set the technical direction of a real-time voice and compliance platform while coding about half the time.

You will lead engineers, design distributed systems, and own latency, reliability and safety in a regulated banking setting, working with production LLM agents, speech pipelines, and cloud operations.

Qualifications

• Hands-on lead role with prior engineering leadership
• Experience shipping large systems with a team
• Strong background in real-time backend systems
• Ability to explain trade-offs to engineers and stakeholders

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for real-time voice and compliance platform
• Write and review code about half the time
• Lead engineers and ship large systems
• Improve latency, reliability, and safety in regulated banking environments

Skills

Python backend

Distributed systems

Team leadership

Cloud operations

Latency optimization

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS/GCP

Databases

Job description

Operations · San Francisco · FullTime · Senior level

This is a hands on lead role for someone who can set the technical direction of a real time voice and compliance platform while still writing and reviewing code about half the time. A strong candidate brings years of building fast, reliable backend systems in Python, plus proven experience leading engineers and shipping large systems through a team. Deep grounding in distributed systems, database design, Kubernetes and cloud operations matters, along with the ability to explain trade offs clearly to engineers, executives and bank stakeholders.

How it fits the AI era

The work centers on AI agents that handle live calls for banks, so much of the engineering effort goes into latency, reliability and feedback loops that let the agents improve over time. AI tools speed up coding and review, but the judgment calls on architecture, build versus buy, and safety inside regulated bank environments stay with people. The lead role is largely about turning messy lender workflows into dependable systems, which still needs human ownership and clear communication.

How it builds AI experience

A candidate would gain hands on exposure to production LLM agent systems, real time speech and telephony pipelines, and the feedback loops that connect customer interactions and human review to model improvement. Building this experience means working on live voice or agent systems where latency and accuracy are measured, and learning how compliance and security shape AI deployment in finance. Prior work with LLM agents, speech to text or text to speech, or regulated fintech settings would strengthen a case for this role.

Worth showing

• Real time backend systems
• Python at scale
• Leading engineers hands on
• Kubernetes and cloud operations
• Distributed systems reliability

This is our own read, written from the employer's posting and the company's Spotlight. The employer's posting is the source of truth for the role.

About Kastle

AI agents that sit on top of banks' and lenders' existing systems to run loan origination, servicing and collections calls.