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 control.
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 (YC W26) is hiring a Head of Growth to lead go-to-market, sales operations, and strategic relationship building across our core markets. This is a high-ownership role at the intersection of fintech, banking, enterprise sales, and product strategy.
You will work directly with the founders to drive revenue, shape distribution, build repeatable sales motion, and expand Kita’s presence across lenders, banks, fintechs, and strategic partners. We are looking for someone who can operate across enterprise sales, partnerships, customer development, conference and market presence on the ground. A core element will be understanding the technical and operational realities of selling into regulated financial institutions, across differing markets.
What you’ll work on
- Own Kita’s go-to-market strategy across banks, fintech lenders, non-bank lenders, and strategic partnerships
- Manage the company’s sales pipeline, outbound motion, follow-ups, and reporting
- Develop partnership channels with platforms, banks, consultants, development institutions, and other distribution partners
- Work closely with the founding team to refine positioning, pricing, sales collateral, customer narratives, and market strategy
- Help translate customer needs into product priorities by developing a strong understanding of technical workflows and underwriting operations
- Run highly organized GTM operations, including pipeline management, meeting preparation, follow-up discipline, pilot tracking, and revenue forecasting
Strong candidates will likely have:
- Experience in growth, enterprise sales, partnerships, or GTM at a fintech, AI, bank, etc.
- Strong understanding of lending, underwriting, credit, fraud, risk, or banking operations
- Experience selling to regulated financial institutions
- Strong operational discipline
- Ability to operate in a fast-moving, high-ownership startup environment
- Technical fluency and comfort understanding APIs, integrations, and product workflows
Especially exciting backgrounds include:
- Experience in SME lending, consumer lending, underwriting infrastructure, or credit products
- Prior work in LatAm, Southeast Asia, or other emerging markets
- Experience with technical fintech products and enterprise deployments
- Technical background
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.
Other roles at Kita
Job details
Salary
$120,000 - $160,000
Equity
0.5% - 1.5%
Location
San Francisco, CA
Experience
0+ 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.