Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

🏢 Kikoff · 📍 San Francisco 💰 $307,000 - $307,000 / yr

⚡ Direct Talent Broker Referral

Why apply through CandidatesReach?

✔ Tailored Executive Endorsement Letter: Highlight your real strengths and verified background directly to hiring leads.

✔ Your Preferred Screening Terms: Choose between a 1-minute quick phone screen or scheduled email calendar.

✔ $500 Cash Hiring Bonus: Receive $500 direct cash reward after 30 days of active employment.

Position Summary & Responsibilities

Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale
Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money.
We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.

Why Kikoff:

This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.

About the Role

Kikoff's infrastructure team builds the systems that enable engineering teams to move quickly without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost discipline. The team owns five connected areas: Observability, Developer Productivity, Compute Infrastructure, Networking and Storage, and Data Infrastructure.

As Engineering Manager, you will share leadership of Infrastructure and initially lead a focused group of engineers within the team. You will support their growth, help turn ambiguous problems into durable systems, and run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers. The team works across five connected areas, but you will not be expected to manage every engineer or personally own every domain on day one. You will partner with senior ICs and Infrastructure leadership, taking on broader scope as the team grows.

This is a player-coach role. You will stay close to the code, architecture, incidents, and people while senior ICs retain clear technical ownership in their domains. You should be comfortable reviewing code and designs, helping make architecture decisions, and contributing directly when useful. Strong ICs should respect your technical judgment because you understand the work, not because you report on it. This does not mean being the primary engineer across all five areas.

AI is increasing the amount of code and change moving through our systems. You will help build a platform that can absorb that growth without creati

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Kikoff Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Evaluators heavily weigh financial inclusion impact metrics, credit-risk modeling intuition, and hyper-growth acquisition strategies for underserved segments.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Elitist or predatory attitudes toward low-income or building-credit consumers.
2. Inability to balance aggressive user acquisition with prudent credit risk management.
3. Lack of compliance awareness regarding fair lending laws and credit bureau reporting.

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I build frictionless consumer fintech products that unlock genuine financial mobility for underserved populations while driving scalable unit economics.

🔒 Free Candidate Preparation Access

Unlock Preparation Priorities & Alignment Hook

🤝 Talent Broker Referral · $500 Bonus Included

Apply for Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

Setup your contact terms & referral note to get recommended directly to the hiring lead at Kikoff.

⚡ Continue with Google (Instant Setup)

or with email

Already have an account? Sign in here