Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus)

About this role

As a Software Engineer at Kira, you will build and own backend services that power critical product workflows, and you will grow quickly while doing it. This role is for an engineer who has already seen a system grow fast and wants more ownership: real design decisions, close collaboration with our VP of Engineering, and mentorship from senior engineers.

This is a product-minded backend role with meaningful work in performance, reliability, and infrastructure. You’ll partner with product and design to ship complete features, contribute across the stack when needed, and have opportunities to meet directly with teachers and students to learn how they use Kira and where we can improve.

This is a full-time position that requires flexibility with work hours and availability outside of regular business hours. We have offices in San Francisco, CA and New York City, NY. We ask that employees work from one of the two locations and come into the office in person 4 days a week (Wednesdays WFH).

## What You’ll Do

• Ship impactful, end-to-end features that improve student and teacher experiences
• Own scoped initiatives from design through rollout, making real design decisions with increasing independence
• Build and scale backend services, APIs, and event-driven systems as our traffic and customer base grow rapidly
• Improve engineering foundations, including code quality, observability, testing, and CI/CD
• Take part in operational excellence: performance, reliability, security, and incident response
• Partner closely with product managers and designers on UX, interaction design, and execution
• Use AI coding tools (such as Cursor and Claude Code) as a daily workflow, and review and understand everything they produce
• Contribute to design discussions and code reviews, and grow through mentorship from senior engineers

## What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience
• Roughly 3–6 years of profession...