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Location
San Francisco, CA
Salary
$170,000 - $250,000
Type
Full-Time
About Kastle
Kastle is the AI operating system for consumer lending, starting with mortgage. They build AI voice and SMS agents that mortgage lenders deploy across contact centers, collections, and compliance operations. The product handles payment collection, escrow questions, new loan qualification, and delinquent-borrower engagement — automating call and text workflows that historically required teams of humans working long hours. Kastle scores each AI call against the lender's own quality framework to guarantee regulatory compliance (FDCPA, RESPA, TILA).
Traction:
- Over $1 billion in payments processed to date
- ~$6M+ in revenue generated in 2026
- Growing from 10 people to 30 by end of 2026
Backed by Y Combinator (S24 batch), Commerce Ventures, and executives from Snapdocs, Google, and WePay.
Why this matters: mortgage servicers are structurally short-staffed on inbound call volume that spikes with delinquency cycles. Borrowers wait in queues to make payments. Compliance is unforgiving. Kastle's bet is that AI voice + SMS agents — with airtight regulatory grounding — can cut cost-to-service by 80% while giving borrowers 24/7 access and giving lenders auditable, always-compliant interactions.
Why Kastle
Tweets, press, and people that show why this team is worth your time.
Link
Kastle joins Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch
Kastle was selected for Y Combinator's prestigious Summer 2024 cohort, highlighting its potential in the AI-driven mortgage servicing space.
Link
Nitish Poddar, Co-Founder and CTO of Kastle, joins Forbes Business Council
Nitish Poddar's inclusion in the Forbes Business Council highlights his leadership and expertise in AI and mortgage servicing.
About This Role
Kastle is hiring 4 Forward Deployed Engineers — the technical face of Kastle inside its most important enterprise mortgage accounts. The hire embeds directly with customers (top-10 mortgage lenders), translates their compliance-heavy workflows into production AI agents on Kastle's platform, and owns the customer relationship end-to-end.
The first month is really just spent embedding yourself in the product — you have to be enough of an expert on the product that you can talk to the enterprises. The archetype — a strong software engineer who wants to be in the room with customers, not a solutions consultant who dabbles in code.
What You'll Own
- Build, configure, and launch AI agents on Kastle's platform to handle real borrower workflows
- Write production-grade backend and full-stack code (Python, Java, TypeScript) to integrate with loan servicing systems, data sources, and telephony platforms
- Own the full agent development life cycle — prototype quickly, set up CI/CD, monitor live usage, iterate to targets, document best practices to speed future projects
- Scope ambiguous customer asks — prototype quickly, iterate into stable deployments
- Act as the technical face of Kastle in key accounts — build trust through speed, empathy, impact
- Feed customer learnings back into the core product — influence roadmap and reusable tooling
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional engineering experience — Sweet spot 3-5 years including 1+ year of customer-facing engineering experience
- Strong Python, Java, or TypeScript — comfortable building APIs and backend systems
- Strong work ethic + very high attention to detail
- Owns projects end-to-end with limited or no guidance
- Customer-centric confidence — comfortable with both business leaders and engineers
- SF-based or willing to relocate immediately — 5 days/week in-person
- Genuine interest in the mortgage / lending space
- Cracked with AI tooling — Claude / Cursor / Codex daily
Profile (in priority order) Tier 1 — Software Engineers Who Want to Be Client-Facing
- Engineers with strong technical chops who've either done customer-facing work or are actively looking for it Tier 2 — Palantir Forward-Deployed Engineers
- Direct archetype match on client-facing engineering muscle Tier 3 — Applied Engineers at AI Agent Companies Tier 4 — Impressive Fast-Moving Startups
- Series A-C startups with product velocity and customer exposure Tier 5 — Big Tech with Zero-to-One Signal
Strong Bonuses
- Previous customer-facing engineering role — FDE, solutions engineer, sales engineer (JD nice-to-have)
- Prior mortgage, lending, or fintech domain experience
- Voice agent, telephony, or contact-center infrastructure experience
- YC founding engineer at a company that grew
- Compliance-heavy vertical AI shipping — legal AI, healthcare AI, financial AI
Location and Visa
- H-1B transfer OK, TN OK
- OPT is a hard no
- O-1 acceptable
Job Details
Experience
3-5 years
Salary
$170,000 - $250,000
Equity
Yes
Visa Sponsorship
Yes
Employment Type
Full-Time
Benefits & Perks
401(k) Match
Lunch And Dinner Covered
Standard Medical / Dental / Vision
Relocation Support
Green Flags
Palantir Foundry FDE (especially FS / gov)
Applied engineer at Sierra / Decagon / Glean / OpenAI Solutions / Anthropic Applied
Voice AI applied engineer (Retell / Vapi / Deepgram / Cartesia / ElevenLabs / PolyAI)
Red Flags
Under 3 years experience without AWS distributed-systems exception
Pure ML researcher
Consultant dabbling in code — not a real engineer
Required Candidate Q&A
Question 1
Are you SF-based or willing to relocate immediately, and comfortable being in-person 5 days/week?
Question 2
What's your US work authorization status?
Candidate scorecard
· 12 criteria3+ years professional engineering experience
1+ year customer-facing engineering experience
Strong Python, Java, or TypeScript