Software Engineering Lead

At Kiwi, we're building financial products used by thousands of customers across lending, payments, risk, customer support, and internal operations. AI is becoming an important part of how we build products, but our foundation remains strong software engineering, scalable architectures, and reliable systems.

We're looking for a hands-on Software Engineering Lead who can actively contribute across the stack, help evolve our architecture, mentor engineers, and lead the integration of AI capabilities into real-world products.

This is not a research role. We're looking for someone who enjoys building, shipping, scaling, and operating production systems.

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  Lead the design and evolution of product architecture across backend, frontend, and AI-powered services.

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  Contribute directly to the codebase as a hands-on engineer.

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  Build and scale APIs, microservices, and event-driven systems.

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  Design solutions that balance performance, reliability, maintainability, and speed of delivery.

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  Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Data, and Operations teams.

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  Help define engineering standards and best practices.

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  Drive the adoption of AI capabilities across products and internal tools.

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  Support the design and implementation of agent-based systems, automation workflows, and intelligent user experiences.

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  Mentor engineers and help raise the technical bar across the team.

• 9+ years of software development experience and 5+ years in technical leadership.

• Strong experience building and scaling web applications in production environments.

• Strong backend development experience and solid frontend development experience.

• Experience designing and operating microservice architectures.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous communication patterns.

• Experience designing APIs and integrating third-party services.

• Experience working with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).

• Experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS.

• Ability to balance architecture, scalability, reliability, and delivery speed.

• Strong ownership mindset and ability to drive technical decisions.

• Preferred: experience in fintech or digital financial products.

• Hands-on experience building products that leverage LLMs, agents, automation, or AI-powered workflows.

• Experience integrating AI capabilities into production applications.

• Familiarity with agent orchestration frameworks, tool calling, RAG architectures, or conversational systems.

• Understanding of evaluation, observability, and monitoring for AI-powered systems.

• Strong ownership mindset.

• Ability to balance technical excellence with business needs.

• Comfortable working in fast-moving environments.

• Strong communication skills in English (fluent).