Senior Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus)

About the role

Kira is a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier Venture Capital funds including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Andrew Ng’s AI Fund https://aifund.ai/, and Primavera. We live in a world where technology is rapidly changing the educational experiences of students and teachers everywhere, and we have the opportunity to shape how this change takes place. It is Kira Learning https://kira-learning.com/’s mission to harness transformative AI technologies to make world-class teaching and learning accessible to everyone.

As a Senior Software Engineer at Kira, you will own core backend systems and infrastructure that power critical product workflows. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy building reliable, scalable services, improving infrastructure and developer tooling. While this is a backend-leaning role, the ideal candidate is comfortable going full-stack when needed, partnering closely with product teams to ship end-to-end features.

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 and we ask that employees work from one of the two locations and come into the office in-person 4 days a week.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- 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

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience

- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience

- Strong backend experience (e.g., Kotlin, Python, Go, Rust, Scala), with willingness to ramp up on Kira’s stack (Kotlin, Python)

- Ability to own technical decisions and execute with minimal guidance in ambiguous environments

- Hands-on experience operating production systems and cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS)

- Experience designing APIs, working with relational databases (e.g., MySQL), and shipping complex systems

- 2+ years experience mentoring and/or managing junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and high-quality delivery

- Familiarity with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and reliable deployment practices

- Clear written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences