Staff Backend Engineer - Core Product (New York)

About Kalepa:

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.

Our Values (This is important):

Our culture is shaped by everyday decisions. Our values help us make them thoughtfully and consistently, especially when tradeoffs are difficult. We learn from mistakes so our good decisions outweigh our bad ones and their benefits compound over time.

• Excellence - We take pride in our craft and expect excellent outcomes in everything we do. We set high standards, verify our work, and own the result. We make deliberate tradeoffs, including rethinking an approach, redoing work, or investing more time.
• Pursuit of the Truth - We seek the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. We question assumptions, give candid feedback, and change our minds when evidence warrants it. We work with customers to understand their challenges and what solving them requires.
• Ensuring Customer Success - We take responsibility for delivering results that matter to our customers. We measure success through improvements in their growth, profitability, and efficiency. We challenge our approach and customers’ requests when necessary, remaining accountable for the outcome.
• First Principles Thinking - We reason from a problem’s underlying facts, objectives, and constraints. We distinguish what is necessary from what is familiar and question assumptions that limit possible solutions. We test our reasoning against reality and address root causes with approaches that scale without unnecessary complexity.

In addition to our NY office, we have remote employees speaking 10+ languages across the globe. But we invest in bringing our people together both for regional meetups and global offsites (2021 - Playa Del Carmen | 2022 - Rome | 2023 - Buenos Aires | 2024 - Lisbon | 2025 - Cartagena | 2026 - Tbilisi).

Kalepa’s culture isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok. But for the people who are a fit, they can’t imagine working elsewhere.

About the role:

Salary range: $246k – $314k USD*

Location: New York, NY (Hybrid)

We’re looking for strong backend engineers who love building reliable systems around fragmented, but high-value data. As part of the Core Backend team, you’ll work on the systems at the center of Kalepa: designing services, data models, pipelines, and evaluation loops. The goal is not just cleaner data, but an intelligence layer that makes better, faster, and more explainable decisions.

You’ll join a high-ownership team responsible for some of Kalepa’s most business-critical infrastructure. Your work will make our data more complete, our decisions more transparent, and our products even more valuable.

You'll be right at home if you:

• Have 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Embody hustle and grit, you're excellent at your craft and relentless in pursuing it.
• Take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight.
• Communicate proactively, surfacing blockers, asking the right questions, keeping stakeholders in the loop.
• Thrive on experimentation: you're comfortable testing ideas, measuring results, and iterating quickly on problems no one has solved before.
• Have strong fundamentals in system design, debugging, and problem-solving.
• Know Python (our main stack), though we're open to strong candidates from other OO backgrounds.
• Have experience with serverless technologies (Lambda, EC2), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
• Are comfortable with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL.
• Bonus: experience with LLMs/generative AI, distributed systems.

What you’ll get:

• Competitive salary (based on experience level)*.
• Significant equity options package.
• Work with an ambitious, smart, global, and fun team to transform a $7T global industry.
• 20 days of PTO a year.
• Global team offsites.
• 100% covered PPO medical, 100% covered vision and dental for individuals and families.
• Healthy living/gym stipend. Mobile phone bill stipend.
• Continuing education credits.
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution (regardless of employee contribution)

*The salary range listed is an estimate and will vary based on a variety of factors. Final compensation will be determined during the offer stage based on relevant experience, performance during the interview process, and geographic location, and may therefore differ from the posted range.