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Kovo is an early-stage fintech startup expanding access to financial tools for underserved Americans historically excluded from traditional credit systems. The company has grown revenue 20x over three years while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency and positive free cash flow. Backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, the team includes alumni from Plaid, Experian, Equifax, Chime, Mercury, and other leading fintech and tech companies.
In this Senior Backend Engineer role, you will own critical backend systems and infrastructure end-to-end, from design through deployment and scaling. You'll build performant, reliable APIs and services powering Kovo's financial products, design scalable architectures on AWS using Node/TypeScript, and ship production code frequently while maintaining high quality standards. You'll make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, scalability, and maintainability, help establish technical patterns and best practices for the engineering team, and interface effectively with product engineers and stakeholders.
The role emphasizes systems thinking, ownership, and accountability. You'll thrive in ambiguity, make technical decisions with incomplete information, and drive projects to completion independently. The company explicitly embraces AI-assisted development tools to accelerate output and maximize impact while maintaining strong code quality and system reliability. You should believe software engineering is evolving toward orchestrating AI agents and be excited by this force-multiplier effect on your output.
Kovo values speed, learning, and impact with minimal bureaucracy and high ownership. However, roles and priorities evolve quickly, some systems and processes are still being built, and the pace is intense—not optimized for work-life balance. Many engineers work more than 50 hours per week.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant backend focus, or equivalent depth
- Experience building and scaling production systems with Node and AWS
- Proficiency with TypeScript (bonus)
- Track record of delivering reliable, performant systems at scale
- Systems-oriented mindset with deep care for performance, reliability, and scalability
- Comfortable in high-intensity roles seeking ambitious workload
- Strong sense of ownership and willingness to deliver on tight deadlines
- Embrace AI code generation and workflow improvements while maintaining quality standards
