The opportunity

We are looking for engineers who enjoy going deep on hard problems and owning end-to-end outcomes. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering and have major ownership and agency: design the systems, make architectural calls under ambiguity, and play a key role in setting the technical direction for the team.

You'll be building and scaling LLM-based systems that process billions of highly unstructured data points every day, extract precise information, and surface insights that insurers rely on for high-stakes decisions, along with the services, data models, and external-facing APIs that sit at the center of Kalepa. This is a problem the industry hasn't solved effectively yet, and you'll be working on cutting-edge challenges that require creativity and ambition. We're a small team where individual contributions have an outsized impact on both our technology and our business.

About the team

This team is tasked with evaluating Kalepa's core operations workflow from first principles. They architect and deliver an extensible insurance workflow pipeline that automates the back office with best-in-class precision/recall, automation, and evals for continuous improvement.

Ownership areas: Kalepa's central evals framework.

What you'll do

Lead backend initiatives: lead the technical and project aspects of key backend initiatives: services, data models, asynchronous pipelines, and evals in Python on AWS.
Set technical direction for LLM systems: set the technical direction for how Kalepa builds and operates LLM-based systems at scale: reliability, cost, latency, evaluation, and explainability.
Lead architecture: lead architectural discussions and decisions across the product; be a strong systems designer.
Deliver major innovations: deliver major product innovations in each release; take leadership in scoping new features and efforts for enhancement.
Manage technical debt: proactively manage technical debt, deciding when to accrue it and when to pay it off.
Partner on decisions: partner with business and product owners to drive firm-wide decisions, pragmatically weighing data, resources, and tradeoffs.
Raise the bar: lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment; lead code reviews.
Spot cross-cutting improvements: identify product and testing improvement opportunities that cross services, modules, and products.
Represent Kalepa: act as an ambassador for Kalepa internally and externally, including in recruiting and training.
Use AI tooling deliberately: use AI tooling to multiply your own impact and that of the team.

What you bring

8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems at scale.
Have delivered as the tech lead on at least one major initiative or project.
Have worked with LLMs in production and understand what it takes to deploy them at scale.
Strong Python skills (our main stack); we're open to strong candidates from other object-oriented 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.
You're consistently a go-to resource for other engineering, product, or business staff on technical matters.
You take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
You communicate proactively and persuasively with engineers, product, and leadership.
You thrive on experimentation and are excited by problems others are struggling with.

Bonus points for:

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.

Location and compensation

We're primarily a remote company with employees across the US, Canada. Our HQ is in New York City.

What you'll get

Competitive salary (based on experience level) and a 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, and continuing education credits.
For US employees only: 100% covered medical, vision, and dental for individuals and families, and a 401(k) plan with employer contribution (regardless of employee contribution).