San Francisco, CA | Full-Time | In-Person

Kite is building the trust framework for the next phase of the agentic internet. Kite is building the trust and transaction layer for the agentic internet; a world where AI agents can coordinate, pay, and act autonomously with safety and accountability. Our infrastructure powers real-time payments, digital identity, and programmable governance on a blockchain designed for AI.

Backed by General Catalyst, Paypal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, 8VC, and others, Kite AI is led by veterans from Databricks, Uber, and Salesforce, with research roots at UC Berkeley, Oxford, Harvard, and MIT.

Kite is seeking a highly experienced and technically profound Lead Backend Engineer to own the design, development, and scalability of our core infrastructure. This is a critical role responsible for building the high-throughput, secure, and low-latency systems that manage agent identities, real-time transaction processing, and verifiable governance.

You will lead the backend architecture, mentor engineers, and ensure the technical quality and performance of our foundational payment and identity infrastructure, enabling autonomous coordination between AI agents.

• System Design & Architecture
• Own the Infrastructure: Lead the design and implementation of highly available, resilient, and scalable backend services for core functionality, including the identity resolution service, transaction engine, and governance protocols.
• Performance & Latency: Establish and monitor performance benchmarks, driving architectural decisions to ensure microsecond-level latency for real-time agent transactions and high-volume throughput.
• Security & Reliability: Design robust systems to handle financial data, cryptographic keys, and verifiable credentials, prioritizing security best practices, auditing, and fault tolerance.
• Technical Leadership & Execution
• Code Excellence: Serve as a technical leader, contributing clean, well-tested code, performing high-quality code reviews, and defining engineering standards and best practices for the backend team.
• Mentorship & Growth: Mentor engineers on complex distributed systems, data modeling, and performance optimization techniques.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with the product team to translate agent protocol specifications and product requirements into reliable backend services.
• Operational Ownership
• Deployment & Monitoring: Manage CI/CD pipelines, optimize infrastructure-as-code, and establish comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to ensure 24/7 reliability.
• Data Modeling: Define the optimal data models for identity linking, transaction history, and governance state persistence.

• Senior Engineering Experience: 5+ years of experience in backend development, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or lead engineer role.
• Distributed Systems Mastery: Deep expertise designing and scaling mission-critical, high-traffic backend services, ideally in the FinTech, identity, or infrastructure domains.
• Language Proficiency: Strong expertise in one or more core backend languages (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, or Python) used for building high-performance APIs and microservices.
• Database Expertise: Extensive experience with relational and non-relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Cassandra, CockroachDB) in a highly available setting.
• Security Fundamentals: Proven experience implementing security best practices, including API authentication/authorization (e.g., OAuth, JWTs), cryptography, and compliance controls.
• Cloud & Containerization: Practical experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP) and production orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).

• Direct experience building systems for real-time payments, digital identity (DID), or verifiable credentials.
• Experience with blockchain technology, cryptographic protocols, or decentralized systems.
• Familiarity with the unique scaling and reliability challenges of AI/LLM infrastructure.
• Previous experience at a fast-growing, venture-backed startup.