Staff Software Engineer - Kilo Code

Role Overview

Accountabilities

• Set technical direction for performance initiatives involving startup time, memory usage, CLI communication, reusable patterns, and instrumentation.
• Design, build, and ship advanced AI-assisted coding capabilities, including auto-approval rules, context optimization, and intelligent application workflows.
• Drive cross-team initiatives across the developer extension, backend services, and AI infrastructure.
• Own features from technical design and implementation through production deployment, rollout, telemetry, and iteration.
• Establish engineering standards for AI coding workflows, token compression, chat interfaces, and scalable LLM integration patterns.
• Identify technical debt, architectural risks, and performance bottlenecks.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, pairing, documentation, and technical guidance.
• Partner with Product and Design on roadmap priorities, feasibility, trade-offs, and incremental delivery.
• Use production data, telemetry, benchmarks, and user feedback to improve reliability, usability, and scalability.

Requirements

• Have 10 or more years of professional software development experience and technical leadership on large-scale production systems.
• Have experience establishing technical direction and making architectural decisions under uncertainty.
• Have deep experience building developer tools, IDE extensions, productivity software, or comparable products serving 100,000 or more users.
• Have expert-level TypeScript and modern JavaScript skills, including asynchronous programming, event-driven architectures, and Node.js runtime optimization.
• Have a strong track record of performance optimization at scale, including profiling, instrumentation, and measurable improvements.
• Have experience with AI-assisted coding tools, chat interfaces, agent-based workflows, LLM integrations, and context-window management.
• Be based in the United States and willing to work Eastern Time Zone hours.
• Experience with developer tooling, AI coding assistants, VS Code extensions, Electron applications, open-source projects, or data science products is highly valued.

Additional Qualifications

• Influence technical decisions across teams and improve engineering practices through mentorship, code review, documentation, tooling, or architecture.
• Translate business and user needs into practical technical solutions and communicate trade-offs to non-engineering stakeholders.
• Work effectively in mature or high-scale codebases while balancing technical debt, reliability, performance, and feature velocity.
• Operate with a collaborative, curious, and accountable mindset in a senior, low-process environment.

Compensation

• Base salary is $200,000–$260,000 for candidates based in New York City and San Francisco.
• Base salary is $150,000–$220,000 for other U.S.-based team members.
• Annual bonus potential and equity participation are offered.

Benefits

• Flexible vacation policy, medical, dental, and vision insurance are provided.
• Short-term and long-term disability coverage and paid parental leave are provided.
• A monthly wellness stipend, Employee Assistance Program, and mental health resources are available.

Workplace

• The role is fully remote with flexible hours.