---
title: 'Staff Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for IT at Kalepa'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-software-engineer-kalepa-for-it-kalepa-us-or-wt16da48vpgj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Staff Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for IT at Kalepa

- **Company:** Kalepa
- **Location:** US OR, Canada
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-05-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/kalepa/jobs/5995682004

## Job description

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

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 a mix of software engineers owning Kalepa’s IT integration platform (public APIs, control plane) and forward-deployed engineers who embed with clients to integrate atop Kalepa’s APIs. The team is tasked with ensuring Kalepa’s deployments are complete, high-quality, and conducive to self-service. The team will define clear criteria for deployment quality and build processes that raise that quality standard for every client. Where the codebase today limits extensibility, they plan and refactor for sustainability.

Ownership areas: Kalepa’s Public APIs and external docs; auth/SSO/permissions; control plane & admin tooling for configuring clients; adapters into external systems that build against Kalepa’s Public API.

## 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)

*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.

## About Kalepa

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Kalepa provides a professional-grade AI platform that automates and augments commercial insurance underwriting, helping carriers make faster, more profitable risk decisions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Backed by venture capital)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, USA
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed on the website; the company was founded by technology veterans.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Insurance Technology (InsurTech), Artificial Intelligence, Commercial Insurance Underwriting
- **Target customers**: B2B; top-tier commercial insurance carriers, Managing General Agents (MGAs), and reinsurers globally.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To strengthen trust, with Professional Grade AI built for insurance." [kalepa.com](https://kalepa.com/company)

## Products & Services
- **Kalepa Underwriting Platform**: A modular, end-to-end AI-powered workspace for commercial underwriting. It covers the entire workflow from submission intake to portfolio management. Key modules include:
    - **Submission Ingestion**: Automatically classifies submissions and extracts data from hundreds of document types (ACORDs, SOVs, loss runs, etc.).
    - **Triage**: Prioritizes submissions most likely to bind and aligns them to appetite and guidelines.
    - **Clearance**: Detects conflicts, verifies completeness, and automates producer routing.
    - **Risk Analysis**: Surfaces critical risk insights, exposures, and third-party data in a single view.
    - **Rating**: Integrates with pricing models (Excel, external raters, internal systems) for scenario comparison.
    - **Quote & Bind**: Manages forms and generates decision-ready quote and binder documents.
    - **Portfolio Management**: Provides live visibility into portfolio performance, sets targets, and offers automated recommendations on product, rate, and appetite.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: The company has been recognized on FinTech Global’s InsurTech100 list for four consecutive years and was named to the 2025 AIFinTech100. [kalepa.com](https://kalepa.com/company)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by IA Ventures and Inspired Capital, along with leaders in technology and financial services. [kalepa.com](https://kalepa.com/company)
- **Growth Signals**: The platform reports significant customer results, including a **58% reduction in quote time**, a **960BP (basis points) combined ratio improvement**, and **31% more premium per underwriter**. The company has a global team spanning 10+ countries and is trusted by leading insurers. [kalepa.com](https://kalepa.com)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Purpose-built AI**: Unlike general-purpose AI, Kalepa’s AI Ensemble Engine is built specifically for insurance, choosing the right model for each task and delivering explainable, verifiable results.
- **End-to-End Workflow**: Covers the entire underwriting lifecycle in a single pane of glass, from submission to portfolio steering, reducing friction across the board.
- **Proven Results**: Demonstrates measurable impact (faster quoting, better risk selection, improved profitability) with top-tier carriers, MGAs, and reinsurers.
- **Modular & Integrative**: Works out of the box, integrates with existing core systems, and adapts to existing workflows for rapid deployment ("live in weeks, not years").

## Strategic Focus
- **Product & AI Leadership**: Deepening its AI capabilities to handle the most complex risks with precision and reliability.
- **Global Expansion**: Growing its global team and customer base across 10+ countries.
- **Portfolio Steering**: Empowering insurers to manage their book of business in real-time, adjusting appetite and strategy based on empirical data.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a "meritocracy" that values transparency, customer impact, and relentless experimentation. The team emphasizes high standards, honest communication, and "winning together." [kalepa.com/careers](https://kalepa.com/careers)
- **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: **Remote-first** with a headquarters in New York City. The global team spans 10+ countries and speaks 10+ languages. Some roles are remote (US or Europe), while others are hybrid in NYC. [kalepa.com/careers](https://kalepa.com/careers)
- **Notable Perks**:
    - Competitive salaries and significant equity options.
    - 100% covered medical, vision, and dental for US employees and their families.
    - 401(k) employer contribution.
    - 20 days of PTO annually.
    - Continuing education credits, healthy living, and mobile phone stipends.
    - Annual international offsites (recent destinations include Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Rome, and Cartagena). [kalepa.com/careers](https://kalepa.com/careers)
- **Engineering Culture**: The team is building best-in-class AI for a massive industry ($7 trillion insurance market). Engineers are expected to take full ownership, experiment rapidly, and deliver quantifiable customer impact.

## Sources
1. [Kalepa Website](https://kalepa.com/)
2. [Kalepa Company Page](https://kalepa.com/company)
3. [Kalepa Careers Page](https://kalepa.com/careers)
4. [Kalepa Job Board (Greenhouse)](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/kalepa)
5. [LinkedIn Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/kalepa)

## Other roles at Kalepa

- [Senior Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-software-engineer-kalepa-for-operations-kalepa-us-or-vdsedk5re945) — US OR, Canada
- [Executive Assistant & Office Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-office-manager-kalepa-new-york-xsk0134nq8ye) — New York, NY
- [Forward Deployed Engineer - Kalepa for IT](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-kalepa-for-it-kalepa-new-york-rgty3tzbahvm) — New York, NY
- [Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-kalepa-united-states-kxq1adyyc77r) — United States
- [Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-kalepa-new-york-s132y79pkbjr) — New York, NY
- [Staff Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-software-engineer-kalepa-for-operations-kalepa-us-or-j822s497wqy7) — US OR, Canada
- [Technical Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-support-engineer-kalepa-united-states-kyma6d7720sd) — United States
- [Strategic Partnerships Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-partnerships-manager-kalepa-united-states-ja3qbbq2ak96) — United States
- [Director of Engineering - Kalepa for Underwriting](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-kalepa-for-underwriting-kalepa-us-or-074ygph72e3c) — US OR, Canada
- [Senior Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for IT](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-software-engineer-kalepa-for-it-kalepa-us-or-40nqx690a7zc) — US OR, Canada