Senior Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for Operations
About The Position
Kalepa builds professional-grade AI systems for insurers, creating software that can read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows. Its products are in production with leading insurers, and the company aims to build an AI operating system for decision-making across insurance. The Senior Backend Software Engineer will build reliable systems around fragmented, high-value data. Kalepa's platform ingests billions of unstructured data points daily, extracts precise information, and surfaces insights used for high-stakes insurance decisions. The engineer will own strategically important and complex parts of the platform—including services, data models, pipelines, evaluations, and external-facing APIs—with minimal oversight. This role works at the intersection of AI and backend engineering and contributes to business-critical infrastructure while helping other engineers do their best work. The team evaluates Kalepa's core operations workflow from first principles and delivers an extensible insurance workflow pipeline to automate back-office work with strong precision, recall, automation, and continuous-improvement evaluations. A key ownership area is the central evaluations framework. Kalepa is primarily remote, with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe and headquarters in New York City.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production.
- Knowledge of Python, Kalepa's main programming language; strong candidates from other object-oriented programming backgrounds are also considered.
- Experience with AWS, serverless technologies such as Lambda and Step Functions, asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
- Strong knowledge of relational databases and performance tuning, ideally PostgreSQL.
- Mastery of software development fundamentals, including system design, debugging, testing, and problem-solving.
- Experience building external-facing APIs or designing integrations with third-party systems.
- Ability to take full ownership of work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
- Proactive communication, including surfacing blockers, asking relevant questions, and keeping stakeholders informed.
- Comfort with experimentation, measuring results, and iterating quickly on unsolved problems.
Nice To Haves
- Experience working with LLMs in production and understanding 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.
Responsibilities
- Lead scoping, design, and delivery of complex Python backend systems on AWS, including 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 used by customers.
- Own database and query performance as data volume grows and proactively manage technical debt.
- Contribute to product-wide architectural discussions and decisions, and work with teams to modify and prioritize development efforts.
- Accurately estimate work, consistently meet deadlines, and help others estimate theirs.
- Take a leading role in incident and bug resolution and serve as a strong debugger for others.
- Lead adoption of development, testing, and deployment best practices.
- Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback.
- Use AI tooling deliberately to increase personal output and quality.
Benefits
- Significant equity options package.
- 20 days of paid time off per year.
- Global team offsites.
- Healthy living/gym stipend.
- Mobile phone bill stipend.
- Continuing education credits.
- For US employees, medical, vision, and dental coverage fully covered for individuals and families.
- For US employees, a 401(k) plan with employer contribution regardless of employee contribution.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
