Senior Backend Engineer

Leopard•New York, NY

5d•$150,000 - $175,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Leopard is an early-stage B2B Insurtech startup on a mission to reinvent how life insurance and annuities are built, distributed, and experienced. We are seeking a full-time Senior Backend Engineer who is excited to help us build the next-generation, AI-native life insurance platform - from the capabilities of the technology itself to the culture of engineering excellence that powers it. In this role, you will own and expand our API and collaborate closely with our CTO and Engineering Lead to shape and scale our policy management platform. You will directly impact how insurers, distributors, and clients work with life insurance – transforming a traditionally complex, paper-heavy industry into one that feels modern, data-driven, and intelligent. We’re looking for people who are passionate about agent-assisted development, energized by solving hard problems with AI and automation, and motivated to help build an engineering culture where experimentation, ownership, and learning are primary values. Development is changing, and we are looking for people who simultaneously have high standards for work quality and the flexibility to propose and adapt new tools and processes as they go from novel to essential. If you want to be part of a high-performing team with room for outsized growth, deep ownership, and the chance to help set the standard for an AI-native insurance platform, this is the opportunity for you. In your first six months at Leopard, you will: Build new endpoints and extend functionality of the backend API that powers Leopard Work with our DevOps team to improve reliability, scalability, and security for our platform Iterate on our overall development process, helping improve engineering velocity and latency with new tools Contribute to our company roadmap, developing ideas on new features and models, and help Leopard grow into the leading platform for life and annuities distribution

Requirements

5-7 years of professional engineering experience
Strong problem-solving skills, you make reasonable decisions independently
Deep knowledge of Typescript, Node.js, and NestJS
Spent significant time and effort over the last year experimenting with and building an LLM code generation and agentic tooling development process
Ship high-quality work in a hybrid, fast-paced, B2B SaaS environment
Owned projects end-to-end and delivered them by hitting key milestones
Have great communication skills; you work well with others, and you own your work

Nice To Haves

Experience in, or familiarity with, the life insurance industry
Early-stage startup experience
Professional working proficiency in Spanish

Responsibilities

Build new endpoints and extend functionality of the backend API that powers Leopard
Work with our DevOps team to improve reliability, scalability, and security for our platform
Iterate on our overall development process, helping improve engineering velocity and latency with new tools
Contribute to our company roadmap, developing ideas on new features and models, and help Leopard grow into the leading platform for life and annuities distribution