Senior 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're looking for strong backend engineers who love building reliable systems around fragmented, high-value data. Kalepa's platform ingests billions of highly unstructured data points every day, extracts precise information from them, and surfaces the insights insurers rely on for high-stakes decisions. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll own strategically important, complex pieces of that system with minimal oversight: the services, data models, pipelines, and evals at its center, and the external-facing APIs that power our customers' core workflows.

You'll work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering, on a problem the industry hasn't solved effectively yet. You'll join a high-ownership team responsible for some of Kalepa's most business-critical infrastructure, and you'll help the engineers around you do their best work.

Salary range

We differentiate our North America salary ranges using two geographical zones: Zone 1 (New York and San Francisco) - $213,000 to $246,000* Zone 2 (all other locations in the US and Canada) - $192,000 to $246,000*

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 a mix of software engineers owning Kalepa’s IT integration platform (public APIs, control plane) and forward-deployed engineers who embed with clients to integrate atop Kalepa’s APIs. The team is tasked with ensuring Kalepa’s deployments are complete, high-quality, and conducive to self-service. The team will define clear criteria for deployment quality and build processes that raise that quality standard for every client. Where the codebase today limits extensibility, they plan and refactor for sustainability.

Ownership areas : Kalepa’s Public APIs and external docs; auth/SSO/permissions; control plane & admin tooling for configuring clients; adapters into external systems that build against Kalepa’s Public API.

What you'll do

• Lead the scoping, design, and delivery of complex backend systems in Python on AWS: services, data models, and asynchronous pipelines.
• Build and scale LLM-based systems that process large volumes of unstructured documents and data with precision and explainability.
• Design external-facing APIs and integrations with third-party systems that customers depend on.
• Own database and query performance as data volume grows; proactively manage technical debt.
• Contribute to architectural discussions and decisions across the entire product, and iterate with teams to modify and prioritize within the development effort.
• Accurately estimate your work, consistently meet deadlines, and help others estimate theirs.
• Take a leading role in incident and bug resolution; be the strong debugger others turn to.
• Lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment.
• Mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback.
• Use AI tooling deliberately to multiply your own output and quality.

About you

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• 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.
• Mastery of software development fundamentals: system design, debugging, testing, and problem-solving.
• Experience building external-facing APIs or designing integrations with third-party systems.
• You take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
• You communicate proactively: surfacing blockers, asking the right questions, keeping stakeholders in the loop.
• You thrive on experimentation: comfortable testing ideas, measuring results, and iterating quickly on problems no one has solved before.
• You're excited by problems others are struggling with.

Bonus points for

• Experience working with LLMs in production and an understanding of what it takes to deploy them at scale.
• Experience with document pipelines and processing large amounts of data.
• Experience with distributed 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.