Staff Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa

About Kalepa:

Insurance is a $7T global industry built on professional labor: underwriting, claims, pricing, operations, and distribution. Kalepa is building AI that can perform that work.

We create professional-grade AI systems for insurers: software that can read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows and operate over long-time horizons. Kalepa begins by augmenting professionals with the tools to succeed at their jobs. That earns us the right to learn from real decisions, capture decision traces, and automate what can be automated successfully over time.

Our products are already in production with leading insurers, driving measurable outcomes and expanding across functions. The opportunity is far broader than any single workflow: to build the AI operating system for decision-making across insurance. For people who want to work on AI that matters, in a sector where correctness, trust, and real-world impact count, Kalepa is just getting started.

Kalepa is backed by leading investors such as IA Ventures and Inspired Capital, and our team brings experience from Meta, Palantir, Block, Affirm, Google, Amazon, McKinsey, Mastercard, and Uber.

Our Values (This is important):

Our culture is shaped by everyday decisions. Our values help us make them thoughtfully and consistently, especially when tradeoffs are difficult. We learn from mistakes so our good decisions outweigh our bad ones and their benefits compound over time.

• Excellence - We take pride in our craft and expect excellent outcomes in everything we do. We set high standards, verify our work, and own the result. We make deliberate tradeoffs, including rethinking an approach, redoing work, or investing more time.
• Pursuit of the Truth -  We seek the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. We question assumptions, give candid feedback, and change our minds when evidence warrants it. We work with customers to understand their challenges and what solving them requires.
• Ensuring Customer Success - We take responsibility for delivering results that matter to our customers. We measure success through improvements in their growth, profitability, and efficiency. We challenge our approach and customers’ requests when necessary, remaining accountable for the outcome.
• First Principles Thinking - We reason from a problem’s underlying facts, objectives, and constraints. We distinguish what is necessary from what is familiar and question assumptions that limit possible solutions. We test our reasoning against reality and address root causes with approaches that scale without unnecessary complexity.

In addition to our NY office, we have remote employees speaking 10+ languages across the globe. But we invest in bringing our people together both for regional meetups and global offsites (2021 - Playa Del Carmen | 2022 - Rome | 2023 - Buenos Aires | 2024 - Lisbon | 2025 - Cartagena | 2026 - Tbilisi).

Kalepa’s culture isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok. But for the people who are a fit, they can’t imagine working elsewhere. 

About the role

We are looking for engineers who enjoy going deep on hard problems and owning end-to-end outcomes. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering and have major ownership and agency: design the systems, make architectural calls under ambiguity, and play a key role in setting the technical direction for the team.

You'll be building and scaling LLM-based systems that process billions of highly unstructured data points every day, extract precise information, and surface insights that insurers rely on for high-stakes decisions, along with the services, data models, and external-facing APIs that sit at the center of Kalepa. This is a problem the industry hasn't solved effectively yet, and you'll be working on cutting-edge challenges that require creativity and ambition. We're a small team where individual contributions have an outsized impact on both our technology and our business.

Salary range

We differentiate our North America salary ranges using two geographical zones: Zone 1 (New York and San Francisco) - $246,000 to $314,000* Zone 2 (all other locations in the US and Canada) - $222,000 to $314,000*

Location

We are primarily a remote company with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe. Our HQ is in New York city. 

About the team

This team is tasked with evaluating Kalepa’s core operations workflow from first principles. They architect and deliver an extensible insurance workflow pipeline that automates the back office with best-in-class precision/recall, automation, and evals for continuous improvement. 

Ownership areas : Central evals framework.

What you'll do

• Lead the technical and project aspects of key backend initiatives: services, data models, asynchronous pipelines, and evals in Python on AWS.
• Set the technical direction for how Kalepa builds and operates LLM-based systems at scale: reliability, cost, latency, evaluation, and explainability.
• Lead architectural discussions and decisions across the product; be a strong systems designer.
• Deliver major product innovations in each release; take leadership in scoping new features and efforts for enhancement.
• Proactively manage technical debt, deciding when to accrue it and when to pay it off.
• Partner with business and product owners to drive firm-wide decisions, pragmatically weighing data, resources, and tradeoffs.
• Lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment; lead code reviews.
• Identify product and testing improvement opportunities that cross services, modules, and products.
• Act as an ambassador for Kalepa internally and externally, including in recruiting and training.
• Use AI tooling deliberately to multiply your own impact and that of the team.

About you

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems at scale.
• Have delivered as the tech lead on at least one major initiative or project.
• Have worked with LLMs in production and understand what it takes to deploy them at scale.
• Know Python (our main stack), though we're open to strong candidates from other OO backgrounds.
• Experience with AWS and serverless technologies (Lambda, Step Functions), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases and their performance tuning, ideally PostgreSQL.
• Consistently a go-to resource for other engineering, product, or business staff in technical matters.
• You take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
• You communicate proactively and persuasively with engineers, product, and leadership.
• You thrive on experimentation and are excited by problems others are struggling with.

Bonus points for

• Experience with document pipelines and processing large amounts of data.
• Experience with distributed systems.
• Experience building external-facing APIs or designing integrations with third-party systems.
• Experience in insurance, fintech, or another data-heavy regulated domain.

What you’ll get

• Competitive salary (based on experience level)*.
• Significant equity options package.
• 20 days of PTO a year.
• Global team offsites (2024 - Lisbon, 2025 - Cartagena, 2026 - Tbilisi).
• Healthy living/gym stipend. 
• Mobile phone bill stipend.
• Continuing education credits.

For US employees only:

• 100% covered medical, 100% covered vision and dental for individuals and families.
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution (regardless of employee contribution)

*The salary range listed is an estimate and will vary based on a variety of factors. Final compensation will be determined during the offer stage based on relevant experience, performance during the interview process, and geographic location, and may therefore differ from the posted range.