Full Stack Engineer (Backend/AI Focus)

FULLSTACK ENGINEER (Backend/ AI focused)

About Kinelo

Kinelo is rethinking how teams work, both with each other and with the AI agents that are becoming integral members of modern software organizations.

Our vision is to transform how companies operate, from high-level strategy to day-to-day execution by both humans and AI. We're starting by helping software teams understand how they work: our platform detects threats to project delivery, prevents issues before they derail timelines, and ensures teams stay on track with scope and quality goals.

From this foundation, we're building the orchestration layer that will manage hybrid human-AI teams—first in software development, then across every knowledge work function.

We dogfood our own software and are working toward having Kinelo actually run our own company.

When we're successful, individuals will have a better experience at work. Traditional management structures have become prone to bias, politics, and sluggish decision-making. For high-performing individuals, this is frustrating and demotivating. With Kinelo, teams are more efficient, companies are more productive, and individuals are empowered to do their best work.

We've raised nearly $10 million and are well-equipped to execute at the highest level. We're building a new team in San Francisco and work out of a comfortable office near 2nd and Mission.

The Opportunity

As a Full Stack Engineer at Kinelo, your job is to build great products that perform well and delight our users and customers.

This role focuses primarily on backend systems and AI agent orchestration (roughly 80/20 split), with exposure to our full stack—from AI/ML-powered intelligence systems to server infrastructure to the unconventional UI layer where our product meets users.

You'll be joining at a pivotal moment: we're building the foundational context and orchestration layer that will power multiple AI agents working alongside human team members. This is a 0-to-1 product where you'll have significant influence on architecture, implementation, and product direction.

We value excellence in engineering skill over precise knowledge of specific technologies. Fast learners are welcome. That said, you need the chops to dive in deep: debugging issues, improving performance, and truly understanding the behavior of the software you're developing and shipping.

What You'll Do

• Build the intelligent core: Develop the context ingestion, memory systems, and orchestration infrastructure that enables AI agents to understand and act on team dynamics, project state, and organizational knowledge
• Ship backend systems at scale: Design and implement reliable, performant server infrastructure in TypeScript that can scale horizontally across tenants
• Integrate AI agents into workflows: Build and refine AI-powered agents that detect project threats, coordinate with each other, and surface insights to users—treating agents as first-class team members
• Develop end-to-end features: Move between backend services, data pipelines, AI systems, and UI components to deliver complete product value
• Balance velocity with quality: Combine cutting-edge AI practices with proven engineering patterns to ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability while shipping fast
• Collaborate across the stack: Work closely with product, design, and leadership to balance technical constraints with business goals and user needs
• Build for the future, pragmatically: Make architectural decisions that enable long-term flexibility without over-engineering for scale we don't yet need

You might work on anything from designing event log structures that power agent memory to orchestrating multi-agent threat detection systems to optimizing database queries to building APIs that expose our platform to external tools via MCP.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong foundation built before AI became ubiquitous—you were a software engineer when engineering fundamentals mattered most
• Strong TypeScript backend experience (recent and production-grade)
• Relational database expertise: Deep understanding of when to use relational databases (Postgres preferred) vs. NoSQL/caching/queuing solutions. You know how to design schemas that scale, when ORMs help vs. hurt, and how indexes actually work
• Cloud deployment experience: Comfortable deploying and troubleshooting containerized applications on public clouds. You can debug a Docker Compose file without handholding and understand how to architect for horizontal scaling
• Strongly typed language background: Experience with at least one statically typed language (Go, Java, C++, Swift, Rust) beyond TypeScript—you write better TypeScript because you understand what strong typing gives you
• Self-starter track record: You've taken projects from 0 to 1 and made technical decisions that had to work
• Team collaboration: Experience working in complex codebases with multiple components and contributors

Strongly Preferred:

• Production AI/ML experience: Building and deploying agent systems or LLM-powered applications that solve real problems. Familiarity with current frameworks, software patterns, and the state of the art in agent implementations
• Architectural judgment: Some experience architecting new projects (doesn't have to be massive systems). You can articulate complex distributed system designs and make pragmatic tradeoffs
• Computer Science education or equivalent analytical degree from a rigorous institution—we value analytical thinking and foundational knowledge

Nice to Have:

• Front-end/React experience (we'll have some UI to build, but it's not the focus)
• Serverless experience (AWS Lambda or similar)
• Experience with prompt engineering and LLM optimization

Kinelo Is For You If

• You lift others up while maintaining exceptionally high standards
• You're compassionate with people while being rigorous with ideas
• You think big, love ambitious ideas, and ask "what would it take?" instead of saying why it's not possible
• You thrive in uncertainty and ambiguity because it means more opportunity to solve hard problems and push boundaries
• You are experienced and bring perspective, but know the world is rapidly changing and that to succeed we must all do things we've never done before
• You naturally ask 'can we get 80% of the value with 20% of the effort?' but know when to invest heavily for strategic advantage
• You are driven to not just meet expectations, but to consistently redefine them. You set a high bar for yourself and inspire those around you to do the same
• You balance craftsman pride with the wisdom to ship fast and iterate
• You see failures as learning opportunities that accelerate our progress

You Won't Be Happy at Kinelo If

• You're not looking to join a team competing in a highly competitive market. We aspire to be sustainably productive and are intentional about rest and relaxation, but the pace is intense
• You let exceptional talent bring exceptional ego. We're all smart and talented, and we don't like jerks
• You prefer well-defined problems over ambiguity and exploration

We Offer

• Competitive salary with meaningful equity and substantial upside potential
• Competitive benefits (health, vision, dental, 401K, etc.) and paid parental leave
• Developer-worthy equipment and tools to ensure you have everything you need to excel
• Nearly endless opportunities for growth and advancement as the company succeeds and meets its objectives

Logistics

• We cannot sponsor visas at this time
• This role is primarily in-person in San Francisco (3+ days/week in office). You'll be collaborating with others in the office and distributed across the U.S.
• Relocation assistance may be available for the right candidate
• Periodic travel for team meetings and retreats is required

To Apply

Please submit a résumé, links, or anything else that helps us understand your background. We care more about aptitude and results than buzzwords.