Founding Software Engineer

Kepler Labs • San Francisco, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

We're building the missing data layer in financial markets: physical risk. Physical risk — drought, heatwaves, flooding, wildfire — impacts more than half of global GDP and costs companies hundreds of billions of dollars per year. But markets can't price it. The data that exists is vague: climate "scores" and 2050 scenarios no investor can actually rely on. We're already working with 3 of the world's top 10 asset managers (over $30 trillion AUM) to solve this problem. Kepler turns events in the physical world into a number investors trust — asset-level, dollar-denominated, point-in-time Earnings-at-Risk, built to sit next to a Bloomberg feed on an investor's desk. The engine is already live, but we need to build from a few thousand assets to tens of millions. Closing that gap, and turning our working system into the category-defining global risk platform, is the central engineering challenge of the company. Our 10-year vision: Kepler is one of the most important companies in finance, thanks to a world model that can accurately predict how events in the physical world will impact assets, companies, and markets. That's what this role will tackle. You'll be our senior founding engineer — one of the first few engineers, and the one who helps define how we get where we need to go.

Requirements

• 4–8 years building data-heavy products in production.
• Willingness to dig in with our customers and understand their pains, forward-deployed engineer style. You don't need previous customer experience, just an openness to talking to customers.
• Genuinely at home in large, messy datasets — not just competent, but excited by making them trustworthy at scale.
• A full-stack generalist who reaches for whatever the problem needs. We care far less about which languages you've lived in than how you think — rigidity about a specific stack is, if anything, a yellow flag.
• High agency: you find the problem and fix it without being asked, and move from architecture to implementation in the same afternoon.
• You ship working systems over perfect prototypes.
• Someone we'll want to build alongside for thousands of hours.

Nice To Haves

• Some exposure to finance — an internship, a stint at a bank / fund / PE / credit shop, quant work, or just a real interest in how markets work.
• Any exposure to risk modeling, financial or adjacent (e.g. insurance).
• Geospatial / remote-sensing experience.
• We'd rather hire someone very smart and very curious who can grow into the domain than someone who ticks every box.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform — the pipeline from raw satellite, climate, and disclosure data to a number institutions trust, and the work of scaling it from hundreds of assets to the whole market.
• Own production rigor — what "correct" means here: reproducible, point-in-time, monitored. The difference between a research result and a dataset people bet capital on.
• Own delivery — the APIs, data shares, and reports that put our numbers directly into how investors work.
• Own the engineering bar — as the first senior hire, you help set the culture, the quality standard, and the build-vs-buy calls the team lives with.

Benefits

• $150K–$200K base + 0.5–1.5% founding-level equity.
• Health-insurance reimbursement (QSEHRA)
• 2 weeks PTO to start — and a real commitment to grow benefits at every raise and milestone.
• An awesome office space to work from in San Francisco

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed