Senior Backend Engineer

Join an early-stage startup.

Unlock access to credit.

Accelerate economic mobility.

Join us as a senior backend engineering hire! If you have experience building performant and stable systems at scale, we'd love to chat. We're looking for someone who can continue meaningfully contributing to our codebase as our business scales. Our backend stack is Node (Typescript) on AWS.

About us

• Kovo is transforming financial access for underserved Americans. We believe everyone deserves the opportunity for economic independence. Our innovative financial empowerment platform creates pathways to credit and financial inclusion, empowering individuals traditionally excluded from financial opportunities.

• We've scaled revenue 10x and improved efficiency 5x over the past two years. Our revenue per employee now exceeds 2x the 90th percentile benchmark among startups. This is a venture-scale company that has started generating positive free cash flow early in its lifecycle, resulting in less dilution for our employees as we accelerate momentum without being dependent on venture funding to stay alive. We're seeking exceptional individuals eager to help us scale another 10x and beyond.

• Kovo is backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, along with founders and leaders from Plaid, Cash App, Affirm, NerdWallet, Ramp, Alloy, MoonPay, Uber, Etsy, LendingClub, Column, Carbon Health, Grindr, and more.

About you

• Energized by building software for a business focused on financial empowerment for millions of underserved individuals

• Comfortable in a high-intensity role and seeking an ambitious workload. We are looking for engineers with a strong sense of ownership and willingness to deliver on tight deadlines. This takes many of our engineers more than 50 hours a week

• Thrive in a remote work environment

• Prior experience (5+ years) in a professional software engineering role

• Motivated to use AI, automation, and data tools in your day-to-day work to push the boundaries of what a single individual can do

• Self-starter who thrives in ambiguity, handles shifting priorities fluidly, and interfaces effectively between backend and frontend

• Worked with Node and AWS in a production setting

• Proficient with Typescript (bonus)

What you'll do

• A little bit of everything! We're a small company, and you'll be expected to pick up many different things. You'll be an early backend hire, so you'll have input in long-term architectural and technical design decisions. You'll help establish the technical foundation for the entire company.

Why you might be excited about us

• Directly impact millions of underserved individuals’ ability to access credit

• Work with minimal bureaucracy, significant ownership, and have broad impact

• We don't micromanage and will set you up to do your best work

Why you might not be excited about us

• We’re a small team; roles and responsibilities evolve quickly

• Priorities and projects shift as we learn and adapt

• We’re still building foundational systems and processes