Job description

About the Job

Position: Founding Engineer
Reporting to: CTO
Location: San Francisco (4+ days/week in person)

Company Overview

Lenders are spending $58BN annually today on hiring humans to perform manual, repetitive work for servicing their loan portfolios. This spend is ineffective - humans are expensive and they make mistakes that lead to compliance fines.

At Kato, we are building an AI-powered loan servicing platform across all communication channels to redefine how loan servicing gets done. With Kato, servicing teams can consist of a single senior operations leader that is managing Kato’s AI agents and only reviewing cases that require escalation.

We are starting today with a compliance first Voice AI agent to automate outbound loan servicing calls, and are already working with customers in the credit card, auto, and SMB lending spaces.

Leadership Team

Pratik Risbud (CEO/Co-Founder): Former Investment Banker at Goldman Sachs and led Credit/Operations at Brex
David Zhu (CTO/Co-Founder): Former Software Engineer at Google and Engineering Manager at Brex

Kato is backed by institutional capital from Pear VC and angel investors from top tech companies including Brex, Bridge, and Square.

The Role

We're seeking a driven, high-impact Founding Engineer to join at this critical growth stage. As our first engineering hire, you'll have an unparalleled opportunity to shape our technical foundation and future.

You'll own mission-critical projects driving company success, initially focusing on enhancing our voice agent quality (latency optimization, interrupt handling, LLM prompting). The role spans our entire technical stack - from real-time voice processing to customer-facing dashboards, infrastructure scaling, and product expansion. There will be significant opportunities to define product direction, build out engineering best practices and technical standards, and rapidly grow your scope and career.

Reporting directly to the CTO, this full-time role includes significant equity ownership.

Key Responsibilities

Lead architecture and implementation of our real-time voice processing system
Design and build scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems
Optimize LLM integration for natural, compliance-aware conversations
Develop internal tools for voice agent monitoring and improvement
Build customer-facing dashboards and reporting systems
Partner with customers to translate requirements into technical solutions
Establish engineering best practices and technical standards
Drive technical decisions that shape product direction

Requirements

Must Have:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
2-5 years of production software engineering experience
Strong background in API design
Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)
Excellent problem-solving and architectural thinking
Strong communication and organizational skills
"Owner's mindset" with bias for action

Nice to Have:

Experience with real-time audio processing or WebRTC
Background in Golang, TypeScript, or React
Experience with LLMs and prompt engineering
DevOps and infrastructure automation experience
Fintech or financial systems background

Tech Stack

Backend: Golang, PostgreSQL
Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, React, TailwindCSS
Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker
AI/ML: Large Language Models, Speech To Text, Text To Speech

Why Join Us

Work with experienced founders who've built and scaled financial products for 9+ years
Work with a CTO with experience in all stages of engineering maturity from 0 to 1, mid-stage startups, all the way to large enterprise companies
Shape the technical foundation of a product revolutionizing a $58BN market
Significant equity package as a founding engineer
Direct impact on product strategy and company direction
Rapid career growth - opportunity to build and lead your own team as we scale
Work with cutting-edge technologies in AI, voice processing, and cloud infrastructure
Define engineering culture and practices from the ground up

Join us in building the future of loan servicing with AI.

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