Careers
Build the intelligence layer for a continent.
Nine roles across engineering, research, commercial and compliance — the ones most critical to Kilwa's next eighteen months.
Why Kilwa
Hard problems, institutional stakes.
Kilwa is a remote-first company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, backed by research validation from Northwestern University's AI Lab and certified by the SBA as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business.
The models are the product
This is not a wrapper. ISI, METI and Sentiment Pulse are original modelling work on genuinely hard problems: sparse data, four languages, and markets where the ground truth is contested.
Work that is published, not hidden
Our methodology, inputs and robustness tests are published with every flagship report. If you build it here, expert readers will see it and interrogate it.
Institutional stakes
Our users are DFIs, sovereign funds and private equity committees deciding where hundreds of millions go. The work has consequences, and the bar is set accordingly.
A market that is not crowded
Almost nobody is doing rigorous, multilingual, predictive intelligence for frontier markets. The whitespace is real and the mission is not abstract.
Open roles
Nine roles, three phases.
We hire in sequence, because the order matters: models first, then the depth and hardening that protects them, then the channels that scale them.
Phase 1 · Months 0–3
Foundation
The models are the product, the pipelines feed the models, and the research lead makes the signals defensible to institutional due-diligence teams.
Phase 2 · Months 3–9
Depth & retention
Deepen the moat in multilingual NLP, harden the platform, protect renewals, and keep compliance certifications audit-ready.
Phase 3 · Months 9–18
Expansion
Open the federal channel that the SDVOSB certification unlocks, as enterprise security questionnaires and FedRAMP conversations intensify.
Students & early careers
The Northwestern pipeline.
Kilwa works closely with Northwestern University's AI Lab and its MSAI programme, bringing students into real modelling and data engineering work on the platform.
If you're a student interested in applied AI for frontier markets, write to us — include what you've built and which part of the problem interests you.
Get in touchDon't see your role?
Tell us what you'd build here.
We read every note. Include what you've made and the part of this problem you want to own.