Source description
About the role
Founding Engineer (DevOps & Security)
San Francisco
Engineering
In office
Full-time
About Kita
In emerging markets, credit infrastructure is broken. Credit bureaus are unreliable, open finance is limited, and most financial data lives in messy documents. As a result, millions of individuals and businesses are locked out of credit because lenders can’t properly assess them.
Kita is building the infrastructure to fix this. We turn messy financial documents into structured, fraud-checked signals that lenders use to make underwriting decisions. We work with customers ranging from fintechs to enterprise banks, and build closely with them on the ground — during the YC batch, we spent time in Manila, Singapore, Jakarta, and Mexico City.
We’re a Stanford AI team backed by Y Combinator, top funds, and leading angels across Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia. During the YC batch, we grew ~40% week-over-week with customers across three continents. Our CTO was ranked #1 in Stanford CS in 2025.
The Role
Kita is seeking a founding engineer to lead infrastructure, deployment architecture, and security for AI systems serving banks and financial institutions in emerging markets.
This role is intended for an exceptional engineer who is equally comfortable designing cloud-native systems, managing production infrastructure, and deploying software within highly regulated enterprise environments. The right candidate will bring deep expertise in DevOps, cloud architecture, and secure systems design, with the ability to architect and operate reliable infrastructure across AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, and on-premise deployments.
The founding engineer leading DevOps & Security at Kita will be responsible for building the technical foundation that enables Kita’s products to operate in high-trust, high-stakes settings. This includes designing secure and scalable infrastructure, supporting private and forward-deployed enterprise environments, and ensuring that our systems meet the requirements of institutions where reliability, auditability, data governance, and deployment flexibility are essential.
What you’ll be working on
- Design and run the infrastructure behind our AI systems
- Deploy our product across cloud, VPC, and on-prem environments
- Build and maintain core systems: CI/CD, monitoring, access control
- Ensure systems are reliable, secure, and production-ready
- Work with customers to get deployments running in real environments
- Help define how we handle security, data, and deployments as we scale
Requirements
- 3+ years building and operating backend or infrastructure systems
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, etc.)
- Strong understanding of systems, networking, and production environments
- Ability to work independently and own projects end-to-end
- Willing to travel and work directly with customers
Nice to have
- Experience in regulated industries (e.g. financial services)
- Experience with VPC, hybrid, or on-prem deployments
- Familiarity with security or compliance standards
This is a highly applied, forward-deployed role. You will work closely with customers and internal teams to design infrastructure that can support enterprise-scale financial workflows under real-world regulatory and operational constraints. The position is well suited to an engineer who combines architectural depth with strong, proactive execution. At Kita, you will help define the infrastructure and security foundations of the company from the ground up.
Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $220,000 per year.
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Req ID: R6
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