Software Engineer @ Kilo Code

About Kilo: We're building the fastest-evolving open-source AI coding agent to make programming accessible to billions. In just a few months: #1 AI coding tool on OpenRouter, over 250K downloads, countless 5-star reviews, multiple Hacker News front page articles. But we're just getting started.

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, but we ship together in Amsterdam every 2-3 months (think: hackathon energy, not conference rooms). We have an office in SF as well
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

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!

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