About Kiva
Kiva is an international nonprofit working in more than 80 countries, with a mission of expanding financial access to help underserved communities thrive. We do this by crowdfunding loans for entrepreneurs, women and students on our kiva.org lending platform, and by addressing the underlying barriers to financial access around the world through innovative projects and partnerships. Our organization combines the culture and technological passion of an internet start-up with the compassion and heart of a nonprofit to create impact and opportunity at global scale. With offices in San Francisco, Portland, New York, Nairobi and Bangkok, Kiva’s team includes 100+ employees and 400+ volunteers worldwide. Our team is growing as we pursue exciting new opportunities to create a financially inclusive world.
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will join an established team at Kiva during an exciting time of growth and innovation. The ideal candidate takes initiative and is passionate about both our organizational mission and our high standards in engineering. You know that effective communication is among the most important tools in your toolbox. You are an engineer—not just by title, but by nature—always looking at how things can be improved and examining problems from all angles. You are dedicated to continuous learning, refining your craft, and geeking out on emerging technologies.
This role is open to both remote candidates and candidates local to our Portland or San Francisco offices, and will report to an Engineering Manager based in Portland. At this time, we can only consider applicants with authorization to work in the United States on a permanent, full-time basis; unfortunately we cannot provide visa sponsorship.
You will:
- Help drive our work to design and build out our new GraphQL + Kotlin + Kubernetes microservices platform, and modernize legacy systems.
- Partner with Product and other stakeholders to deliver elegant solutions and key customer-facing projects
- Help foster a spirit of innovation and collaboration both within the engineering team and across the organization
- Solve challenging problems using scalable, loosely coupled services
- Work to create impactful and sustainable solutions to complex problems by taking bold and measured risks
- Balance your technical excellence with a high E.Q., showing up with a sense of empathy, awareness, and responsibility
- Share the knowledge you gain generously with your peers to perpetuate a culture of engineering excellence
Qualifications
Required:
- 4+ years platform (back end) development experience
- Solid experience with a systems language such as Kotlin, Java, or Scala
- Solid experience writing modular, loosely coupled code
- Solid experience writing well tested code using an xUnit test framework or similar
- Solid experience with Object-oriented programming
- Experience with LAMP Stack or similar (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP)
- Knowledge of RESTful APIs
- Familiarity with continuous integration
- BS or MS degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline or equivalent experience
Preferred:
- Experience doing Agile development (such as Scrum)
- Experience working for a Fintech company
- Experience with Spring Boot/Spring Framework
- Experience using and/or creating GraphQL APIs
- Experience with container based development (Docker and Kubernetes)
- Experience with continuous deployment
- Knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
What We Offer
- An amazing mission: Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty across the globe.
- An opportunity to improve real lives, solve hard problems, and change the world.
- Friendly, supportive, and adventurous environment with a team of engaged colleagues.
- Casual, high performing work environment.
- A comprehensive, industry-leading benefits package.
- Opportunities to connect with and learn from colleagues and partners around the world.
A diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other is an integral part of Kiva's culture. We actively welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and a great place to work. Join us and help us achieve our mission!
We will only accept applications directly from candidates. Kiva will not be responsible for any recruiting agency fees, absent a formal agreement.