Senior Software Engineer
Software Engineering @ Kilo Code
About Kilo: Kilo is the all-in-one, open-source agentic engineering platform. We're #1 on OpenRouter, have 1M+ active developers, and process over 21 trillion tokens monthly. We're growing fast, shipping constantly, and building in public.
Kilo Code is more than just another coding tool. We're creating a superset of the best features from existing AI coding agents, combined with our own innovations, all built with community feedback at the core.
The situation: We’re an open source AI coding tool taking on Cursor, Windsurf, and the rest. We are growing fast and want to work with other engineers excited about accelerating software development across the globe while shipping features our users love.
We’re generally looking for engineers with 10+ years of professional experience (or equivalent depth of ownership and impact).
You are:
Into building features and product more than obsessing on the details of technology, but can also go deep on technology when needed to solve problems
Fast. Like, uncomfortably fast for normal companies. Ship a bad feature Monday, fix it Tuesday, scale it Wednesday.
You take end-to-end ownership of what you ship — from defining the problem to launching in production, measuring impact, and iterating based on real user feedback.
Someone who both likes to use agents to code with them and still rolls their sleeves up and writes hand-typed farm-to-table code line by line when things get tricky
Knows the balance between moving fast & breaking things and moving too fast & causing a forest fire and loves dancing on that knife edge
Comfortable operating with high autonomy and minimal process. You don’t wait for perfect specs or heavy structure — you move, decide, and adjust.
Comfortable making technical and product decisions independently, and standing behind those decisions.
Kind, thoughtful, honest, open, and patient with others
Week 1 you will:
Ship an internal release of a new feature
Get plugged into our user community and start chatting with our users
Month 1 you will:
Own a product area
Be accountable for how that feature performs in production — not just that it shipped.
Have a solid relationship with the team & a good understanding of the codebase
Deeply understand your users area
Month 3 you will:
Be flying across the code base with comfort, confidence, and purpose
Be operating with minimal direction and clear ownership of a product area or system.
The work setup:
Remote (strong preference for ET, CT, or Western Europe time zones) but we ship together in person every 2-3 months (think: hackathon energy, not conference rooms).
You’ll spend 90% of your time building product. Be that backend, frontend, infrastructure, whatever is needed, we match your strengths to our roadmap while giving you room to grow. Our whole stack is Typescript and our database of choice is postgres. (Except for Jetbrains)
We work with folks from other timezones so doing effective hand-offs and writing things down or putting them in pull requests is critical. Prepare to be on lots of google meets calls but mostly short, focused 1:1 and very few meetings where you are just warming the chair
We thank people publicly, give feedback directly, and own our mistakes
Your dopamine needs to come from shipping, not from code for code's sake
Anti-requirements:
Needing pixel perfect designs before starting on something
Needing a QA department
“I didn’t build that, so I’m not fixing that."
Comfort with slow
Waiting for consensus before making a call
The Reality of Working at Kilo
We want to be transparent about what it takes to succeed here.
We Work Exceptionally Hard: We are ambitious, and ambition requires effort. Most people who do not succeed at Kilo fail because they underestimate the work ethic required. We’re not a 9-9-6 shop, but we do expect you to bring energy, intensity, and grit every single day.
High Accountability: We don't hide behind vanity metrics. You will own outcomes, not just pull requests. You will have a number (WAUzer), and you will be responsible for hitting it.
A Driven Culture: We foster healthy competition and a shared will to win. We support each other, but we also push each other to be the absolute best.
Apply with:
Links to stuff you’ve shipped, github profile, portfolio etc. Not required, but we want to get to know as much about you as we can before we meet!