ABOUT OUR COMPANY
Kira is building the first AI-native global banking-as-a-service platform.
We provide modern banking infrastructure to companies in emerging markets powering essential financial services - including remittances, import/export payments, and payroll. Our mission is to make global financial access seamless, programmable, and intelligent.
We have raised
$7M in seed funding, led by Blockchange Ventures, Stellar and Vamos Ventures.
Our customers include global leaders such as OXXO, Binance and Polygon.
ABOUT OUR TEAM
The team is led by fintech veterans with backgrounds from Stanford, Dartmouth, and Wharton.
The CEO, Edrizio De La Cruz, is a former partner at Y Combinator and founder of Arcus (sold to Mastercard). He is also the bestselling author of The Underdog Founder. Learn more about his story: HERE
THE ROLE
We are hiring a Senior Banking Infrastructure Architect Engineer to design and build the core financial infrastructure powering Kira.
You will architect and implement the foundational systems that make Kira a programmable bank:
- The core banking ledger
- Our BaaS orchestration layer
- A proprietary AI-driven transaction monitoring / KYT engine
This is not a feature team role.
You will define how money moves through the company.
You should be comfortable making irreversible decisions data models, ledger invariants, reconciliation strategy, and regulatory-grade auditability.
What You’ll Build
1) Core Banking Ledger
Design and implement the system of record for money at Kira.
You will own:
- Double-entry ledger architecture
- Balance correctness guarantees
- Idempotent posting engine
- Multi-currency accounting (fiat + stablecoin)
- Reconciliation pipelines (banks, blockchains, payment networks)
- Historical audit reconstruction
- Time-travel queries for compliance investigations
- High-throughput posting engine (not batch accounting)
Your job is to ensure balances are never wrong - even during outages, retries, and partial failures.
2) Banking-as-a-Service Infrastructure
Build the orchestration layer between Kira and sponsor banks / payment rails.
You will design:
- Account lifecycle state machines
- Virtual account routing
- Payment ingestion and normalization
- Settlement orchestration (ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, RTP, local rails)
- Webhook reliability and replay systems
- Provider abstraction layers (bank failover & redundancy)
- Operational tooling for support & compliance
Goal: clients should not know which bank they are using — and neither should their customers.
3) Proprietary AI KYT Engine
Build a real-time transaction monitoring and risk intelligence platform.
You will help create:
- Behavioral risk scoring models
- Streaming transaction classification
- Entity graph relationships
- Adaptive monitoring rules (beyond static AML rules)
- Alert triage automation for compliance teams
- Explainable decisions for regulators and audits
We are not building a dashboard.
We are building a machine that understands money flows.
Responsibilities
- Architect financial systems with regulatory-grade correctness
- Design ledger and reconciliation models
- Define system invariants and failure modes
- Lead critical technical decisions across the platform
- Collaborate with compliance to encode regulatory logic into software
- Build tooling for investigations and financial operations
- Mentor engineers and set infrastructure standards
- Write production code (this is hands-on)
Requirements
Experience
- 7+ years backend or distributed systems engineering
- Experience designing financial, accounting, or payment systems
- You have built at least one system where correctness mattered more than uptime
- Comfortable owning architecture end-to-end
Strongly Preferred
- Ledger or accounting system design
- Payment processing or banking integrations
- Reconciliation pipelines
- Event-driven architectures
- High integrity data systems (immutability, auditability)
- AML / transaction monitoring exposure
Technical
You should be comfortable reasoning about:
- Consistency vs availability tradeoffs
- Idempotency
- Exactly-once semantics (or why it doesn’t exist)
- Deterministic state machines
- Event sourcing vs relational models
- Monetary precision & rounding errors
- Concurrency and race conditions
Stack matters less than judgment.
Who This Role Is For
You might enjoy this role if:
- You’ve argued about ledger design before
- You care about edge cases more than frameworks
- You’ve written postmortems about money mismatches
- You think most fintechs are just UI over a bank API
- You want to build infrastructure that other fintechs depend on
This is not a product CRUD role.
What You’ll Get
- Direct influence on company architecture
- Work on real financial infrastructure, not wrappers
- High autonomy
- Equity aligned with long-term ownership
- Small team, high trust environment
How We Evaluate Candidates
We don’t rely on leetcode.
We’ll ask you to:
- Design a ledger
- Model failure cases
- Explain tradeoffs
- Think through real financial incidents
We care more about how you think than how fast you code.
Structure and comp
- Remote (this will be the only role in the company thats fully remote & without travel requirements)
- Hours as needed, may include nights and weekends
- Comp: $65k to $100k USD, Equity: 0% to 1.0% (the higher the cash, the lower equity), $6k health stipend, 2 week PTO.
