Software Engineer, Early Career

Koah Labs

San Francisco, CA · $120k–$160k a year · Posted August 18, 2026

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Pay compared with the market

This listing pays about $140,000 a year. Across 1,072 open software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $152,500 to $246,500 and the median is $194,000. That is 28% below the median, below the middle half of those listings.

Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.

Software Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay

About the job

Who We Are Koah Labs is building the ad network to power the next generation of AI-native products. Our mission is to help publishers monetize and help advertisers reach the right audience — without compromising speed, UX, or privacy.

We’re a small, tight-knit team in San Francisco with backgrounds at X, Apple, Meta and early-stage startups. We’ve raised from top investors and are growing fast with real traction on both the publisher and advertiser sides of the marketplace.

Working at Koah means joining at the ground floor: you’ll ship code that shapes the company and the ecosystem we’re building. We move quickly, operate with high trust, and care deeply about craft.

Our Stack

- Infra: Terraform, AWS, LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir), Tailscale, Cloudflare

- Data: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka, Python

- Core Application: Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript

- SDKs: iOS, Android, Web, Flutter, React Native

In this role, you will:

- Help shape core ad experiences and shape how people see ads across our ad network

- Tackle meaningful challenges with increasing autonomy, crafting code that millions of users will experience

- Take ownership of projects that matter, make critical technical decisions, and contribute your unique perspective to our product vision.

- Work alongside passionate experts across design, product, and data to create the advertising experience in this new era

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Enjoy proactively communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

- Are comfortable working across the stack, tackling new tasks out of your comfort zone, and can handle ambiguity

- Work well in-person and enjoy fast feedback loops

- Enjoy breaking down problems and testing your hypotheses

- Get excited about end-to-end ownership within high agency environments

WANT TO STAND OUT?

We receive a high volume of applications, and we want to give everyone a fair chance to show us what they can do beyond their resume.

We’ve put together a short, optional take-home assessment. It’s not required to apply, but completing it is highly encouraged and will help us prioritize reviewing your application.

Complete the optional take-home assessment https://app.notion.com/p/Koah-Labs-Take-Home-OA-3c6cbbc66b0f8027bcbec3ff8ccd25d0