Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

San Francisco

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 creating more incidents, unsustainable cost, or a team that depends on heroics.

In This Role, You Will

Lead and Grow the Team

• Lead, coach, and develop a focused group of experienced infrastructure engineers, expanding your scope over time.
• Hire engineers who can work across domains, take ownership of production outcomes, and earn the trust of their peers.
• Stay close enough to the work to coach from evidence. Review code and designs, challenge weak decisions, make architecture calls, and unblock the team directly when needed.
• Partner with senior ICs who own technical direction and execution within their domains. Within your initial scope, establish clear ownership, backup coverage, growth paths, and a sustainable on-call model.

Partner on Technical Direction

• Help connect technical direction across observability, developer productivity, compute, networking, storage, and data infrastructure.
• Uphold high engineering standards for reliability, testing, safe deployments, security, and maintainability.
• Make clear tradeoffs between speed, reliability, cost, and long-term operating complexity.
• Lead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, then make sure the system is better after service is restored.

Run Infrastructure as a Product

• Understand what Kikoff engineers need and turn that into a focused roadmap with clear priorities.
• Build paved paths and self-service systems that teams choose because they are faster and safer than one-off solutions.
• Unblock teams using the fastest responsible path, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability.
• Measure outcomes for internal customers, including delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load.

Build a Durable Operating Model

• Make sure critical services have an owner, a backup, an SLO, actionable alerts, a dashboard, a runbook, capacity expectations, and a tested recovery path.
• Use service health, incidents, delivery data, cost, and customer feedback to decide what the team works on next.
• Close incident actions and recurring operational gaps instead of allowing them to become permanent background work.
• Help build an operating model that does not depend on constant interrupts, heroics, or one person's memory to stay healthy.

You Have

• 8+ years of engineering experience and 2+ years managing engineers, or an equivalent record of technical leadership and people development. You have repeatedly taken on greater scope while retaining the trust of strong engineers.
• A strong first principles infrastructure foundation. You can review code and designs, make architecture decisions, and contribute directly when needed.
• Experience operating consequential production systems, responding to incidents, and improving what remained after the immediate problem was solved.
• A track record of hiring, coaching, and developing strong engineers. You know what good looks like and can help people get there.
• Experience setting technical direction and turning ambiguous infrastructure problems into a roadmap the team can execute.
• Comfort making decisions with incomplete information and changing course when the evidence changes.
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, leadership, and cross-functional partners.

Nice to Have

• Depth in one or more of observability, cloud compute, networking, storage, data infrastructure, developer tooling, or security.
• Experience running internal platforms as a product in fintech or another regulated environment, including measuring adoption and customer outcomes through a period of rapid growth.

What We're Like

Scrappy. We move quickly and build what we need. We do not cut corners when they matter, and we do not over-engineer when they do not.

Risk-oriented. We make tradeoffs deliberately. A mature team knows the difference between a risk worth taking and one that is not.

Data-obsessed. We look at the data, understand the mechanics behind it, and use that evidence to make better decisions.

Humble. We know the company has benefited from timing, circumstance, and the right people showing up. We are grateful, and we do not take it for granted.

Base Range $307,000 - $352,000 USD

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

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