Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

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 let engineering move quickly without giving up 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 lead and grow this team, set technical direction, and run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers. You will decide where the team should invest, help engineers turn ambiguous problems into durable systems, and make sure the work improves how the company builds and operates. This is a player-coach role. You will stay close to the code, the architecture, the incidents, and the people. You should be comfortable reviewing code and designs, making architecture calls, and contributing directly when the team needs you. Strong ICs should respect your technical judgment because you understand the work, not because you report on it. 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 experienced infrastructure engineers across five connected areas. 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. Give each area clear ownership, backup coverage, growth paths, and a sustainable on-call model. Own the Technical Direction Support the 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 one-off solutions. Unblock teams through the fastest responsible path, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability. Measure outcomes for internal customers, including delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load. Build a Durable Operating Model Make sure critical services have an owner, backup, SLO, actionable alerts, dashboard, runbook, capacity expectations, and a tested recovery path. Use service health, incidents, delivery data, cost, and customer feedback to decide what the team works on next. Close incident actions and recurring operational gaps instead of allowing them to become permanent background work. Build an organization that does not depend on consta…