### 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.