Senior Product Engineer
Pear VC
Senior Product Engineer @ Kato
About the Job
Position: Senior Product Engineer (Full-Time)
Reporting to: CTO
Location: San Francisco (4 days/week in person)
Company Overview
Lenders spend over $24B every year hiring agents to perform manual, repetitive servicing work. Existing AI solutions try to automate this, but they treat regulatory guardrails as an afterthought - meaning they can’t guarantee compliance and can’t be trusted with critical servicing workflows.
Kato takes a different approach.
Regulations aren’t an afterthought - they’re the foundation. We start with a regulatory rules system and layer an AI decision engine on top of it. With this architecture, we’re building an AI-powered servicing platform that automates critical workflows across every channel with full compliance and best-in-class recoveries. Human teams are then free to focus only on the judgment-driven work that truly needs them.
We are starting today with a compliance first Voice AI agent that handles outbound and inbound loan servicing calls, and are already in production with major names in the fintech lending space like Bilt Rewards and Parafin.
Kato is founded by a team with deep operating expertise in financial services and software engineering:
Pratik Risbud (CEO/Co-Founder): Former Investment Banker at Goldman Sachs and led Credit/Operations at Brex
David Zhu (CTO/Co-Founder): Former Software Engineer at Google and Engineering Manager at Brex
Kato is backed by institutional capital from Pear VC and angel investors from top tech companies such as Brex, Bridge, and Square. We are looking for top talent to join our team and power our growth.
The Role
We're seeking a driven, high-impact Senior Product Engineer to work directly with customers to build impactful new products and improvements. As our second engineering hire, you'll have an unparalleled opportunity to shape our technical foundation and future.
You'll own mission-critical projects driving company success, initially focusing on onboarding new customers and augmenting our voice agent framework as new customer needs arise. The role spans our entire technical stack - from real-time voice processing to customer-facing dashboards, infrastructure scaling, and product expansion. There will be significant opportunities to define product direction, build out engineering best practices and technical standards, and rapidly grow your scope and career.
Reporting directly to the CTO, this full-time role includes significant equity ownership.
Key Responsibilities
Lead architecture and implementation of our real-time voice processing system
Design and build scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems
Optimize LLM integration for natural, compliance-aware conversations
Develop internal tools for voice agent monitoring and improvement
Build customer-facing dashboards and reporting systems
Partner with customers to translate requirements into technical solutions
Establish engineering best practices and technical standards
Drive technical decisions that shape product direction
Requirements
Must Have:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
2-5 years of production software engineering experience
Strong background in API design
Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)
Excellent problem-solving and architectural thinking
Strong communication and organizational skills
"Owner's mindset" with bias for action
Lives and breathes product and code quality
Endless curiosity and learning drive
Nice to Have:
Experience with real-time audio processing or WebRTC
Background in Golang, TypeScript, or React
Experience with LLM integration and prompt engineering
DevOps and infrastructure automation experience
Fintech or financial systems background
Tech Stack
Backend: Golang, PostgreSQL,
Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, React, TailwindCSS
Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker
AI/ML: Large Language Models, Speech To Text, Text To Speech
DevOps: GitHub Actions, Datadog
Why Join Us
Work with experienced founders who've built and scaled financial products for 9+ years
Work with a CTO with experience in all stages of engineering maturity from 0 to 1, mid-stage startups, all the way to large enterprise companies
Build something meaningful - this won’t be a 9-to-5. It will be intense, rewarding, and career-defining. You will own core customer relationships and parts of the technical stack from day one.
Shape the technical foundation of a product revolutionizing a $24BN market
Get unmatched career acceleration: you’ll be working directly with customers getting direct feedback and direction from customer needs.
Direct impact on product strategy and company direction
Work with cutting-edge technologies in AI, voice processing, and cloud infrastructure
Define engineering culture and practices from the ground up