About the role
About Kita
In emerging markets, credit infrastructure is broken. Lenders rely on messy documents, fragmented borrower communication, and manual review
Kita is the AI platform for global lending operations. We automate loan origination, application completion, document verification, and credit review for lenders in markets where underwriting is still trapped in messy documents and manual follow-up — from the Philippines and Mexico to the US. Kita’s AI credit officer works directly with borrowers over WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, and email to collect missing information, resolve inconsistencies, and keep applications moving, while our AI underwriter extracts fraud-checked data and localized risk signals from chaotic financial documents to support faster, higher-quality credit decisions. The result is a more complete application pipeline, dramatically lower manual review burden, and a lending operation that moves faster without compromising risk.
We’re a Stanford AI team backed by Y Combinator, top funds, and leading angels across Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia. During the YC batch, we grew ~40% week-over-week with customers across three continents. Our CTO was ranked #1 in Stanford CS in 2025.
The opportunity
Kita is seeking a founding engineer to lead infrastructure, deployment architecture, and security for AI systems serving banks and financial institutions in emerging markets.
This role is intended for an exceptional engineer who is equally comfortable designing cloud-native systems, managing production infrastructure, and deploying software within highly regulated enterprise environments. The right candidate will bring deep expertise in DevOps, cloud architecture, and secure systems design, with the ability to architect and operate reliable infrastructure across AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, and on-premise deployments.
A founding engineer leading DevOps & Security at Kita will be responsible for building the technical foundation that enables Kita’s products to operate in high-trust, high-stakes settings. This includes designing secure and scalable infrastructure, supporting private and forward-deployed enterprise environments, and ensuring that our systems meet the requirements of institutions where reliability, auditability, data governance, and deployment flexibility are essential.
Requirements:
- 3+ years engineering cloud infrastructure, networking
- Can contribute across the full stack, with a focus on building resilient, scalable backend systems.
- Independent and autonomous. We expect that every person at the company owns their work and can be a leader.
- Willling to travel to our customers (currently across SEA, LatAm, and South Africa)
- Expertise in IAM and access control, CI/CD, observability, container orchestration
- Production operations - disaster recovery, private networking, and enterprise deployment models spanning SaaS, VPC, hybrid, and fully on-premise environments.
- Familiarity with compliance-oriented software architecture and the operational expectations of large financial institutions is strongly preferred.
We are particularly interested in candidates who have built software in highly regulated sectors (ie. financial services, government, defense, healthcare).
This is a highly applied, forward-deployed role. You will work closely with customers and internal teams to design infrastructure that can support enterprise-scale financial workflows under real-world regulatory and operational constraints.
The position is well suited to an engineer who combines architectural depth with strong execution. At Kita, you will help define the infrastructure and security foundations of the company from the ground up.
About Kita
In emerging markets, open finance is still nascent. Most of the population is traditionally unbanked, banking APIs don’t exist, and a borrower’s financial history lives in documents: e-wallet records, bank statements, utility bills, and more. Because this data is unstructured, credit and risk teams are forced into manual review. This slows decisioning, increases costs, and caps lending volume.
Kita is the AI platform for global lending operations. We help lenders in emerging markets automate application completion, document verification, and underwriting from messy financial documents — using AI to extract fraud-checked data and localized risk signals that power faster, better credit decisions.
Under the hood, Kita is a learning engine. We link document-level signals to repayment outcomes, allowing our models to continuously improve fraud detection and risk assessment over time. This creates a compounding advantage for lenders as their distinct underwriting decisions feed back into the system.
We’re Carmel and Rhea. We met before Stanford and have been building together ever since. Carmel is from Manila, is a repeat founder, and spent three years in product at Apple. Rhea has a research background in computer vision and received the highest honor in Stanford Computer Science. Together, we combine deep local context with strong technical execution to build the infrastructure that expands access to credit in emerging markets.
Required skills
Other roles at Kita
Job details
Salary
$150,000 - $220,000
Equity
0.5% - 1.5%
Location
San Francisco, CA
Experience
3+ years
Funding
Total raised
$4.5M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.