Engineering Manager

We're building the one-stop shop for creator finances. Your favorite digital creators—the ones you follow every day on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Twitch—aren’t just extraordinarily talented personalities and community builders. They’re also businesses. That means they have business needs—managing revenues, expenses, savings, credit, and banking. We’re building products that help creators spend less time worrying about finances so they can focus on creating. About the Role We’re looking for our first Engineering Manager to join the team and help shape the future of our engineering culture, systems, and product. This is a unique opportunity to lead from the front — you’ll roll up your sleeves to design systems, write code, and ship features while also setting the bar for technical excellence, collaboration, and product thinking. You’ll work closely with product, design, and operations to build delightful, scalable fintech products. The ideal candidate has a strong engineering background who can just as easily jump into system design reviews as they can draft a product spec, and who thrives in a highly collaborative, fast-moving environment. Previous product management experience (or a strong product sense with the desire to flex into PM responsibilities) is a huge plus. This is a great role for someone who wants to blend hands-on engineering with team leadership, and help scale a fintech product from the ground up. This position is based in Los Angeles, CA. The compensation for this role is between $180k to $200k. What you’ll do: Lead by example — writing production code, owning system design decisions, and setting technical standards. Partner with product, design, and operations to define and ship high-impact features. Build and mentor a small, distributed, high-performing engineering team with a culture of collaboration and accountability. Establish best practices around system design, testing, security, and deployment. Drive alignment across engineering and product on priorities, tradeoffs, and execution. Create a technical roadmap that balances immediate business needs with long-term scalability. Help recruit, onboard, and develop engineers who thrive in a fast-paced startup environment. Act as a thought partner to leadership on product strategy, technical architecture, and company growth. What you'll need: 6+ years of professional software engineering experience. 2–3 years in a leadership or managing role. Proven ability to ship high-quality products end-to-end — from system design to launch. Strong product sense: you care deeply about user experience and business outcomes, not just code quality. Track record of cross-functional collaboration with product, design, and operations teams. Experience in system design, architecture, and scaling modern web applications. Strong communication skills — able to distill technical tradeoffs into clear recommendations. Prior product management experience (or strong desire to flex into product responsibilities) is a big plus. Fintech or payments experience is a plus, but not required. Working in an early stage startup experience is a plus, but not required. Comfort with ambiguity and a “get shit done” mentality. Why Karat? Huge opportunity. The creator economy just flew past a $50b milestone despite zero infra for creator banking. It’s our race to lose. Fascinating problems . We want to empower creators to focus on what they love and what matters most—being creative and growing their creator business. We are trying to figure out how to make the headaches and challenges of financial services easy. The right team. We’ve got a diverse team with talent from top companies (e.g., Goldman Sachs, McKinsey), previous startup founders, and folks who create content and understand the space! We work hard together and have fun at dinners, on hikes, and even over zoom (despite the oxymoron). Culture. We love hanging out with board games, delicious dinners, and brisk hikes as much as we enjoy delving into personal philosophy, management theory, and nitty gritty business details. Don't be afraid to bring yourself to work! Resources and growth. We’re well capitalized from top investors like Signal Fire and Union Square Ventures; CEOs from YouTube, Twitter, Wealthfront, and CAA; and investors including Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Y Combinator, CRV, and Coatue. We keep a lean team, and this is a rare opportunity to join. You’ll learn a lot, build foundational products, and grow as our company scales. Feel like you are the right fit? Please upload your resume and answer a few quick questions here: https://trykarat.typeform.com/to/AOz009P7