Backend Software Developer Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Backend software developers are among the most sponsored roles in the U.S. tech industry. Employers routinely file H-1B visa, O-1 visa, and L-1 visa petitions for qualified engineers, and many offer E-3 visa sponsorship for Australian citizens. A computer science or related degree is standard for visa eligibility. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
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Get Access To All JobsINTRODUCTION
Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money.
We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.
Why Kikoff:
This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.
About Fynn (AI Credit Coach)
Fynn is Kikoff's AI credit coach, and the intelligence layer across our entire ecosystem. Rather than offering generic advice, Fynn analyzes a user's credit report and financial profile to deliver highly personalized answers, surface the next steps that matter most for their goals, and connect them directly to the tools that help them take action, from credit-building to AI-powered debt negotiation, all within Kikoff.
Fynn is already one of the most-used surfaces in the Kikoff app, and early engagement shows real demand for guidance people can actually act on. Debt is the single most common topic users bring to it, and from a single chat a user can launch our voice agent to negotiate with creditors on their behalf. Members who lean on Fynn tend to make faster progress on their credit, and we're still early in what it can become.
We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help take Fynn from a powerful reactive assistant to a proactive coach that anticipates user needs and prevents credit mistakes before they happen. You'll own the backend systems that power personalization, orchestrate LLM and agent workflows, and turn millions of conversations into measurable financial progress at scale, in a regulated environment where accuracy and trust are non-negotiable.
What You'll Be Doing
- Design and implement the core backend systems behind Fynn: the conversational AI layer, personalization engine, and the orchestration that connects users to Kikoff's suite of tools and marketplace offerings.
- Build LLM-powered workflows and agents, integrating model providers, retrieval over user credit and financial data, tool-calling, and the AI Debt Negotiation voice agent into reliable, production-grade pipelines.
- Own the evaluation and quality infrastructure that lets us ship safely, including automated scorers across accuracy, tone, compliance, and privacy, plus the tooling to test prompt and model changes before they reach users.
- Turn insight into action at scale, building the systems that detect financial challenges in a user's profile and surface tailored, timely next steps across the user lifecycle.
- Integrate with internal services and third-party providers such as credit bureau data, financial profiles, and Kikoff's product surfaces, building robust APIs and data pipelines that maintain accuracy and consistency for millions of users.
- Enhance observability and reliability, introducing monitoring, alerting, latency management, and fault tolerance into AI-critical systems where a wrong answer carries real consequences.
- Help evolve Fynn from reactive to proactive, building the foundations for anticipatory guidance that reaches users at the right moment.
- Work closely with our product, data science, and operations teams to ship features that directly impact our customers' financial wellbeing while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, compliance, and security.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems
- Strong systems design skills; you've architected and shipped distributed systems that handle high throughput and maintain data consistency
- Track record of making infrastructure decisions that balance technical excellence with business pragmatism
- Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar)
- Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning
- Comfort building in an environment where correctness, latency, and user trust all matter at once
Ideal Candidate Also Has
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered products such as RAG, agentic/tool-calling workflows, prompt engineering, or eval frameworks
- Experience working within a client-server architecture, even if only on one side of it (backend services, the client/mobile app, or the API contract between them)
- Experience with AI quality and safety systems: automated evaluation, guardrails, and testing model/prompt changes before release
- Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, credit bureau data)
- Background in fintech, payments, or lending infrastructure
- Technical Leadership: Ability to own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation and rollout
- Mentorship: Help level up the team through code reviews, design docs, and technical guidance
- Impact Focus: Balance technical perfection with pragmatic delivery; you know when to build for scale vs. ship fast
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner effectively with product, data science, and operations to deliver customer value
- Operational Excellence: Take ownership of the reliability and performance of the systems you build
What Makes This Role Exciting
- You'll build the intelligence layer at the center of Kikoff, the product that increasingly defines how millions of users experience their financial journey.
- Your work directly improves the financial lives of real customers. Not nice-to-haves, but measurable, life-changing outcomes.
- AI is at the core of the company, not a side project. You'll work at the frontier of applied LLM systems in a real, regulated, high-stakes consumer product.
- Greenfield opportunities to architect new systems as Fynn evolves from reactive assistant to proactive coach.
- Small, high-impact team where your contributions are immediately visible.
Base Range
$244,000 - $292,000 USD
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
INTRODUCTION
Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money.
We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.
Why Kikoff:
This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.
About Fynn (AI Credit Coach)
Fynn is Kikoff's AI credit coach, and the intelligence layer across our entire ecosystem. Rather than offering generic advice, Fynn analyzes a user's credit report and financial profile to deliver highly personalized answers, surface the next steps that matter most for their goals, and connect them directly to the tools that help them take action, from credit-building to AI-powered debt negotiation, all within Kikoff.
Fynn is already one of the most-used surfaces in the Kikoff app, and early engagement shows real demand for guidance people can actually act on. Debt is the single most common topic users bring to it, and from a single chat a user can launch our voice agent to negotiate with creditors on their behalf. Members who lean on Fynn tend to make faster progress on their credit, and we're still early in what it can become.
We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help take Fynn from a powerful reactive assistant to a proactive coach that anticipates user needs and prevents credit mistakes before they happen. You'll own the backend systems that power personalization, orchestrate LLM and agent workflows, and turn millions of conversations into measurable financial progress at scale, in a regulated environment where accuracy and trust are non-negotiable.
What You'll Be Doing
- Design and implement the core backend systems behind Fynn: the conversational AI layer, personalization engine, and the orchestration that connects users to Kikoff's suite of tools and marketplace offerings.
- Build LLM-powered workflows and agents, integrating model providers, retrieval over user credit and financial data, tool-calling, and the AI Debt Negotiation voice agent into reliable, production-grade pipelines.
- Own the evaluation and quality infrastructure that lets us ship safely, including automated scorers across accuracy, tone, compliance, and privacy, plus the tooling to test prompt and model changes before they reach users.
- Turn insight into action at scale, building the systems that detect financial challenges in a user's profile and surface tailored, timely next steps across the user lifecycle.
- Integrate with internal services and third-party providers such as credit bureau data, financial profiles, and Kikoff's product surfaces, building robust APIs and data pipelines that maintain accuracy and consistency for millions of users.
- Enhance observability and reliability, introducing monitoring, alerting, latency management, and fault tolerance into AI-critical systems where a wrong answer carries real consequences.
- Help evolve Fynn from reactive to proactive, building the foundations for anticipatory guidance that reaches users at the right moment.
- Work closely with our product, data science, and operations teams to ship features that directly impact our customers' financial wellbeing while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, compliance, and security.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of experience with modern backend frameworks and a track record of building and scaling production systems
- Strong systems design skills; you've architected and shipped distributed systems that handle high throughput and maintain data consistency
- Track record of making infrastructure decisions that balance technical excellence with business pragmatism
- Production experience with background job processing systems (Sidekiq, Resque, or similar)
- Solid understanding of database optimization, caching strategies, and performance tuning
- Comfort building in an environment where correctness, latency, and user trust all matter at once
Ideal Candidate Also Has
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered products such as RAG, agentic/tool-calling workflows, prompt engineering, or eval frameworks
- Experience working within a client-server architecture, even if only on one side of it (backend services, the client/mobile app, or the API contract between them)
- Experience with AI quality and safety systems: automated evaluation, guardrails, and testing model/prompt changes before release
- Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or regulated environments (ACH, card processing, credit bureau data)
- Background in fintech, payments, or lending infrastructure
- Technical Leadership: Ability to own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through implementation and rollout
- Mentorship: Help level up the team through code reviews, design docs, and technical guidance
- Impact Focus: Balance technical perfection with pragmatic delivery; you know when to build for scale vs. ship fast
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner effectively with product, data science, and operations to deliver customer value
- Operational Excellence: Take ownership of the reliability and performance of the systems you build
What Makes This Role Exciting
- You'll build the intelligence layer at the center of Kikoff, the product that increasingly defines how millions of users experience their financial journey.
- Your work directly improves the financial lives of real customers. Not nice-to-haves, but measurable, life-changing outcomes.
- AI is at the core of the company, not a side project. You'll work at the frontier of applied LLM systems in a real, regulated, high-stakes consumer product.
- Greenfield opportunities to architect new systems as Fynn evolves from reactive assistant to proactive coach.
- Small, high-impact team where your contributions are immediately visible.
Base Range
$244,000 - $292,000 USD
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
See all 19,185+ Backend Software Developer Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Backend Software Developer roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Backend Software Developer
Target companies with a strong H-1B filing history
Employers who have sponsored H-1B workers before understand the process and are far less likely to back out mid-hire. Consistent filers signal genuine sponsorship infrastructure, not just good intentions during the interview.
Confirm your role qualifies as a specialty occupation
Backend developer roles generally qualify, but job postings that say 'bachelor's preferred' rather than 'required' can create problems at USCIS. Ask recruiters to confirm the position requires a degree in a specific technical field.
Apply before the H-1B registration window closes
H-1B registration opens in March each year. If you're targeting an October 1 start date, you need an offer in place before then. Timing your job search around this window significantly improves your chances of a clean transition.
Australian citizens should actively pursue E-3 roles
The E-3 visa has no lottery and a 10,500 annual cap that has never been filled. Backend developers with Australian citizenship can start as early as four to six weeks after receiving an offer, bypassing the H-1B wait entirely.
Highlight cloud and system design experience in your application
Employers filing H-1B petitions for backend roles need to demonstrate the position requires specialized expertise. Resumes that emphasize distributed systems, API architecture, or cloud infrastructure make the specialty occupation case stronger from the start.
Browse Migrate Mate for roles that explicitly offer sponsorship
Most job boards don't filter by sponsorship availability. Migrate Mate is built specifically for visa holders and lists backend roles from employers already willing to sponsor, saving you the step of screening each company individually.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does backend software development qualify for H-1B sponsorship?
Yes. Backend software development is one of the most consistently approved specialty occupations under the H-1B visa program. USCIS requires that the role demands a bachelor's degree or higher in a specific technical field, such as computer science, software engineering, or information technology. Roles requiring general business degrees or where any degree satisfies the requirement are more likely to face a Request for Evidence.
Do I need a computer science degree specifically, or will other fields work?
USCIS requires a degree in a field directly related to the job duties, not necessarily computer science specifically. Software engineering, information systems, mathematics, and electrical engineering have all supported successful H-1B petitions for backend roles. What matters is a logical connection between your degree field and the technical work described in the job offer. Unrelated degrees can be compensated for with progressively responsible work experience in some cases.
How competitive is H-1B sponsorship for backend developer roles?
The H-1B lottery selects roughly 25 to 30 percent of registrations in a typical year, meaning most applicants don't get selected on the first attempt. However, backend developers at cap-exempt employers, such as universities or certain nonprofits, are not subject to the lottery at all. Australians can bypass the lottery entirely through the E-3 visa. Migrate Mate lists roles from both cap-subject and cap-exempt employers so you can identify which path applies to each opportunity.
Can I switch backend developer jobs while on an H-1B?
Yes, and H-1B portability makes it relatively straightforward. If your new employer files an H-1B transfer petition before your current status expires, you can start the new role as soon as the petition is received by USCIS, without waiting for approval. The new job must be in the same or a similar occupational classification as your current role, which is rarely a problem for backend developer positions.
Are backend developer roles commonly sponsored at startups, or mainly large tech companies?
Both sponsor, but the process differs. Large companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have dedicated immigration teams and sponsor hundreds of H-1B workers annually, making the process more predictable. Startups can and do sponsor, but smaller companies sometimes lack the infrastructure or legal support to navigate the process smoothly. When evaluating startup offers, ask directly whether they have sponsored visas before and whether they work with an immigration attorney.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Backend Software Developer jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.