Founding full-stack engineer

Kiki founding full-stack engineer JD

Location: Office in Shoreditch, London. Working in person, 5 days a week.

Total compensation: £180k (£80-90k salary + £80-90k equity)

This JD is just a snippet and to apply you need to read our bigger hiring manifesto doc to have a clear understanding of what you’ll be building and joining us entails.

How to apply? Link is at the bottom of hiring manifesto below

Kiki hiring manifesto for our founding engineer

TDLR: Kiki helps people who've never sublet their room or home before earn money while they're travelling, invite only. $5.3m seed, solved the cold start across 4 countries, $6.3m earned by hosts, sued by NYC, now in London growing 5x in 9 months to $4.7m gross ARR, team of 6 and hiring for our 3rd founding engineer with huge ownership.

About Kiki:

Kiki is an invite-only sublet club. We’re not about property, we’re solving a deeply human trust problem: how can you feel comfortable sharing your home with a stranger? Our answer: by showing you how you can trust someone through mutual friends and similarity while being an invite-only community so everyone's a friend of a friend. This is a very interesting problem to try to solve, as it's a fundamentally human problem of who you trust, but we're solving that with technology.

We have successfully built this over the last 7 years in 4 countries. We now have 2 years of runway in the bank, raised $5.5m USD to date from Blackbird, the biggest VC in Australasia and angels who were execs at Facebook marketplace, Airbnb, Uber, Turo, Bumble, Canva and more. 

We’ve launched in New Zealand, Sydney, New York and now London matching over 12,000 people and earning hosts over $6.3m USD. We were the first startup in our space to get sued by NYC state in mid 2025 and fled to launch London in July 2025 (it’s a wild story). By mid 2027 our goal is to help our London hosts earn $10m USD of rent from matching 20,000 people. We will build the world’s first AI-centric global subletting marketplace that acts like your mutual friend (explained in the hiring manifesto). By doing this it will unchain the world from their rent which will impact 1 billion people. 1/8th of the world's population. 

Traction since London launch 13 months ago:

We’re currently growing 3x faster than NYC and for 6 months grew 30% almost every single month this year going from $1.2m gross ARR to $4.7m gross ARR (annualized revenue runrate). Since launch we’ve had 2650 matches (which is 6000 people staying or hosting a Kikier) and earned hosts over $2.65m USD all with a team of 6 people organically. 

The role: 

You, Joe and Rodger will be responsible for the entire tech stack and have a lot of ownership over the product.

You’ll be building in person, in our Shoreditch coworking space (Shoreditch Exchange) and we work hard as we have big goals to achieve this year. You get to control your own schedule and work when you do your best work. If you're a night owl or a morning person, work however you like. We have the same work ethic as startups in San Francisco. But we still see our friends weekly, go to the gym 4 times a week, play tennis/other sports and really enjoy this life, as we’re grinding hard but not running ourselves into the ground.

We pay for all your meals and eat well. We try to get 8 hours of sleep a night (we love sleep and think it’s stupid not to). We really do prioritise looking after ourselves and not burning out (it’s a marathon not a sprint). We do a team activity every week and hangout a lot outside of ‘work’. 

Product: 

Our current stack is: React Native, Typescript, React, Vite, Next.js, Nest.js, Postgres, AWS, Vercel, and Terraform. 

Your first project will be shipping the below features for our iOS app, built in React Native, which just released 2 weeks ago and already has 2500 downloads. Over the next 6 months we’ve got a clear roadmap of exciting features to build, including in-app messaging, searching via an interactive map, and building a trust layer that will show all guests and hosts exactly how they’re similar and know each other. 

In the near future we’ll start building towards an AI-driven marketplace that acts like your mutual friend, powered by over 10,000 real Instagram conversations we’ve had with users over the last two years - data no one else has. Unlike Airbnb, which optimizes transactions, Kiki is built to optimize trust and relationships, with AI reading between the lines to surface hidden overlaps and show two people how they know each other - and therefore why they can trust each other.

(Explained in detail in the hiring manifesto).  

What are our thoughts on AI in the engineering team?

We believe AI, piloted well, can be a massive productivity multiplier, and for a small, fast moving team, that's invaluable. In Engineering, we use AI across the entire software development lifecycle: writing code, reviewing it, and testing it. This lets us ship faster while shipping higher quality, more reliable code to production. The exact tools and processes we use internally evolve as we learn and experiment, and we're keen to double down further to move and build even quicker.

P.s Rodger hasn’t written a line of code from scratch in 1.5 years now!

Who’s in the team?

Toby, 26 - founder/CEO

Tems, 26 - 1st hire/generalist 

Joe, 25 - 1st engineer

Rodger, 27 - 2nd engineer

Sam, 22 - operations

Chin, 23 - generalist

Who you are:

We’re looking for our 3rd founding engineer in London (or elsewhere happy to pay for your relocation). 

You’re a full-stack engineer who has experience in the front-end and is ideally front-end heavy (but not a deal breaker) as our current team skews back-end. We’re hiring a product designer as well so you will have a lot of design support. 

You love building, have no ego, learn fast, and are comfortable with ambiguity. You are a first principles problem solver, not a people manager. We just need to build and my aim is to protect your and the engineering teams time as much as possible to focus on that. 

You will have incredibly high ownership over the product and engineering team culture from day one; helping us build the foundation for what we want to become the best place for engineers to work in the world, working on one of the hardest human problems, using technology to help solve and scale human trust.

Building a business like ours isn’t easy, society and cities will be against you (just google my name and read the articles) but you need to stay strong and keep walking through fire with us. We are searching for someone ready for a journey of a lifetime. You'll build deep trust with a small, close team who will back you completely and push you just as hard.

Skills/experience needed: 

• Computer science or software engineering degree (or something similar) 

• Built end to end projects before or worked in a startup building product end to end as one of the main engineers

• 3+ years professional experience ideally in startups or similar situations (however, everyone’s different so just let us know what else you’ve done if not)

Total compensation: £180k (split between salary and equity)

• £80-90k salary 

• £80-90k equity (negotiable depending on salary) 

• We can sponsor your visa

• Will support your relocation if you need and find you housing through staying in Kiki’s (get to experience the magic first hand)

• Free meals 2x a day 5x a week

• Free gym membership (up to £50 a month) 

• Free physio session every 2 weeks (can’t have us stiff from sitting all day)

If you haven’t read the bigger hiring manifesto please read that now before applying. The link to apply is at the end of the manifesto.

Kiki hiring manifesto to be our 3rd founding engineer 

We’re also hiring multiple engineers so if you want to join the team and bring a friend, we’d love that! 

Cheers, Toby x