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.

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.

• 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

• Kind, thoughtful, honest, open, and patient with others

Week 1 you will:

• Be paired up with another engineer and immediately dive into the code

• Assist in testing features, shipping features, and fixing bugs

• Get plugged into our user community and start chatting with our users

Month 1 you will:

• Significantly contributed to shipping a large project or feature

• Have a solid relationship with the team & a good understanding of the codebase

• Have opinions and ideas on new products and features

Month 3 you will:

• Have hired a first teammate (or told us why we shouldn’t yet)

• Have championed and built a revenue or user impacting feature, end to end

• Be flying across the code base with comfort, confidence, and purpose

The work setup:

• Remote (strong preference for ET, CT, or Western Europe time zones) but we ship together in Amsterdam 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.

• 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

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 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!