Senior Backend Software Engineer

The opportunity

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.

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. They will define clear criteria for deployment quality and build processes that raise that 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 and admin tooling for configuring clients; adapters into external systems that build against Kalepa's Public API.

What you'll do

• Build complex backend systems: lead the scoping, design, and delivery of services, data models, and asynchronous pipelines in Python on AWS.

• Scale LLM-based systems: build and scale systems that process large volumes of unstructured documents and data with precision and explainability.

• Design external APIs: design external-facing APIs and integrations with third-party systems that customers depend on.

• Own performance: own database and query performance as data volume grows; proactively manage technical debt.

• Shape architecture: contribute to architectural discussions and decisions across the product, and iterate with teams to prioritise within the development effort.

• Estimate and deliver: accurately estimate your work, consistently meet deadlines, and help others estimate theirs.

• Lead incident response: take a leading role in incident and bug resolution; be the strong debugger others turn to.

• Raise the bar: lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment.

• Mentor: mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback.

• Use AI tooling deliberately: use AI tooling to multiply your own output and quality.

What you bring

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production.

• 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.

• 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: you surface blockers, ask the right questions, and keep stakeholders in the loop.

• You thrive on experimentation: you test ideas, measure results, and iterate quickly on problems no one has solved before.

• You're excited by problems others are struggling with.

Bonus points for:

• Experience working with LLMs in production and an understanding of what it takes to deploy them at scale.

• Experience with document pipelines and processing large amounts of data.

• Experience with distributed 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).