Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

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About the role

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 on

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