Senior Backend Engineer - Grant Underwriting and Payment

Kikoff
San Francisco
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeUSD 244,000 - 292,000 annuallyFunction: Software EngineeringExperience: 5+ yearsSkills: ["Communication","Leadership","Problem-solving"]

Senior Backend Engineer on the Grant Core team builds and scales critical fintech systems powering underwriting decisions, payment processing, and collections. You will own multi-rail payment infrastructure, design distributed services for high throughput, optimize background processing, and lead system architecture and data pipelines in collaboration with product and data science teams.

Loading

Loading job details...

Preparing the role view and application actions.

FursaFursa
Kikoff
Kikoff
5 months ago

Senior Backend Engineer - Grant Underwriting and Payment

âś“ Verified Job

Canonical indexed version, validated from employer's careers page.

Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 22 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Senior Backend Engineer on the Grant Core team builds and scales critical fintech systems powering underwriting decisions, payment processing, and collections. You will own multi-rail payment infrastructure, design distributed services for high throughput, optimize background processing, and lead system architecture and data pipelines in collaboration with product and data science teams.
Location: San Francisco
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering
Seniority: Sr. Manager level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Own and scale our multi-rail payment systems (ACH, RTP, card networks) to handle transaction volume while maintaining 99.99% reliability.
  • •Design and build scalable backend services that can handle millions of transactions with low latency and high throughput.
  • •Optimize our Sidekiq job infrastructure to efficiently process complex workflows for underwriting, collections, and payment distribution.
  • •Lead architectural decisions for our core financial systems, balancing speed, reliability, and cost as we scale.
  • •Build robust data pipelines that power our ML models and real-time decision engines.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 244,000 - 292,000 annually

Key Requirements

  • •5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems.
  • •Strong systems design skills - you’ve architected and shipped distributed systems that handle high throughput and maintain data consistency.
  • •Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar).
  • •Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning.
  • •Ideal: Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, real-time payments).
Experience:5+ yearsFintechPaymentsLending infrastructureDistributed systems
Skills:CommunicationLeadershipProblem-solving
Languages:English
Tech Stack:SidekiqResqueACHRTPCard networksDatabasesCachingDistributed systemsData pipelinesMl models

Company Brief

Kikoff
Kikoff provides a credit-building product that helps consumers build credit history and access affordable lines of credit through a mobile-first platform and educational tools to improve financial health.
Industry: Lending
Growth: Early Stage Startup
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2019
Website