Staff Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for Operations

About the role

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.

Salary range

We differentiate our North America salary ranges using two geographical zones:

Zone 1 (New York and San Francisco) - $246,000 to $314,000*

Zone 2 (all other locations in the US and Canada) - $222,000 to $314,000*

Location

We are primarily a remote company with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe. Our HQ is in New York city.

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: Central evals framework.

What you'll do

Lead the technical and project aspects of key backend initiatives: services, data models, asynchronous pipelines, and evals in Python on AWS.

Set the technical direction for how Kalepa builds and operates LLM-based systems at scale: reliability, cost, latency, evaluation, and explainability.

Lead architectural discussions and decisions across the product; be a strong systems designer.

Deliver major product innovations in each release; take leadership in scoping new features and efforts for enhancement.

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 the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment; lead code reviews.

Identify product and testing improvement opportunities that cross services, modules, and products.

Act as an ambassador for Kalepa internally and externally, including in recruiting and training.

Use AI tooling deliberately to multiply your own impact and that of the team.

About you

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.

Know Python (our main stack), though we're open to strong candidates from other OO 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.

Consistently a go-to resource for other engineering, product, or business staff in 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.

What you’ll get

Competitive salary (based on experience level)*.

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.

Continuing education credits.

For US employees only:

100% covered medical, 100% covered vision and dental for individuals and families.

401(k) plan with employer contribution (regardless of employee contribution)