Staff Backend Engineer, Operations

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, NY

5d•Remote

About The Position

Kalepa is building professional-grade AI systems for insurers that read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows. The systems augment insurance professionals and, over time, automate work based on real decisions and decision traces. Products are already in production with leading insurers. The Staff Backend Engineer will work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering, with substantial ownership over system design, architectural decisions, and technical direction. The role involves building and scaling LLM-based systems that process large volumes of unstructured data, extract precise information, and surface insights for high-stakes insurance decisions, as well as developing the backend services, data models, and external-facing APIs at the center of Kalepa. The operations team evaluates Kalepa’s core operations workflow from first principles and builds an extensible insurance workflow pipeline to automate back-office work. A key ownership area is the central evaluation framework. The company is primarily remote, with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe, and its headquarters in New York City.

Requirements

At least 8 years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems at scale.
Experience serving as the tech lead for at least one major initiative or project.
Production experience with LLMs and understanding of what it takes to deploy them at scale.
Knowledge of Python, Kalepa’s main programming stack; strong candidates from other object-oriented 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.
Track record of being a go-to technical resource for engineering, product, or business colleagues.
Ability to take full ownership of work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
Ability to communicate proactively and persuasively with engineers, product teams, and leadership.
Comfort with experimentation and enthusiasm for challenging problems.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Lead technical and project aspects of key backend initiatives, including services, data models, asynchronous pipelines, and evaluations in Python on AWS.
Set technical direction for building and operating LLM-based systems at scale, including reliability, cost, latency, evaluation, and explainability.
Lead architectural discussions and decisions across the product and serve as a strong systems designer.
Deliver major product innovations in each release and lead the scoping of new features and enhancement efforts.
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 adoption of development, testing, and deployment best practices, and lead code reviews.
Identify product and testing improvements that span services, modules, and products.
Represent Kalepa internally and externally, including in recruiting and training.
Use AI tooling deliberately to increase personal and team impact.

Benefits

Significant equity options package.
20 days of PTO per year.
Global team offsites.
Healthy living/gym stipend.
Mobile phone bill stipend.
Continuing education credits.
For US employees: 100% covered medical, vision, and dental insurance for individuals and families.
401(k) plan with employer contribution, regardless of employee contribution.

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