[Hiring] Senior Backend Software Engineer @Kalepa

Role Description

We're looking for strong backend engineers who love building reliable systems around fragmented, high-value data. Kalepa's platform ingests billions of highly unstructured data points every day, extracts precise information from them, and surfaces the insights insurers rely on for high-stakes decisions. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll own strategically important, complex pieces of that system with minimal oversight: the services, data models, pipelines, and evals at its center, and the external-facing APIs that power our customers' core workflows.

You'll work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering, on a problem the industry hasn't solved effectively yet. You'll join a high-ownership team responsible for some of Kalepa's most business-critical infrastructure, and you'll help the engineers around you do their best work.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• 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.
• Mastery of software development fundamentals: system design, debugging, testing, and problem-solving.
• Experience building external-facing APIs or designing integrations with third-party systems.
• You take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
• You communicate proactively: surfacing blockers, asking the right questions, keeping stakeholders in the loop.
• You thrive on experimentation: comfortable testing ideas, measuring results, and iterating quickly on problems no one has solved before.
• You're excited by problems others are struggling with.

Requirements

• Lead the scoping, design, and delivery of complex backend systems in Python on AWS: 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 that customers depend on.
• Own database and query performance as data volume grows; proactively manage technical debt.
• Contribute to architectural discussions and decisions across the entire product, and iterate with teams to modify and prioritize within the development effort.
• Accurately estimate your work, consistently meet deadlines, and help others estimate theirs.
• Take a leading role in incident and bug resolution; be the strong debugger others turn to.
• Lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment.
• Mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback.
• Use AI tooling deliberately to multiply your own output and quality.

Benefits

• 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).

Company Description

Insurance is a $7T global industry built on professional labor: underwriting, claims, pricing, operations, and distribution. Kalepa is building AI that can perform that work. We create professional-grade AI systems for insurers: software that can read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows and operate over long-time horizons. Kalepa begins by augmenting professionals with the tools to succeed at their jobs. That earns us the right to learn from real decisions, capture decision traces, and automate what can be automated successfully over time.

Our products are already in production with leading insurers, driving measurable outcomes and expanding across functions. The opportunity is far broader than any single workflow: to build the AI operating system for decision-making across insurance. For people who want to work on AI that matters, in a sector where correctness, trust, and real-world impact count, Kalepa is just getting started.

Kalepa is backed by leading investors such as IA Ventures and Inspired Capital, and our team brings experience from Meta, Palantir, Block, Affirm, Google, Amazon, McKinsey, Mastercard, and Uber.