Founding Engineer (DevOps & Security)

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.