Tech Lead Manager - Core UX

Position: Tech Lead Manager - Core UX (USA)
About Kalepa:

Commercial insurance is a trillion-dollar industry still run out of Microsoft Outlook.

Kalepa is changing that.

Kalepa is an AI Underwriting Platform built to deliver Professional-Grade AI in production - helping the world's most important insurers centralize and prioritize submission data, surface critical risk insights, and make faster, more confident decisions. Customers see meaningful improvements to both speed and portfolio quality as soon as they implement Kalepa - so much so that clients call it "truly an underwriter's dream."

Kalepa is backed by leading investors such as IA Ventures and Inspired Capital, and our team brings experience from Facebook, Google, Amazon, Mastercard, and Uber.
Our Values (This is important):

Many organizations have a dusty list of corporate values that no one ever follows. Kalepa is not one of those companies. Our values are designed to unlock the potential of our employees.

Success at Kalepa is bred from five core principles:

• Hustle & Grit - We expect everyone at Kalepa to be excellent at what they do and relentless in pursuing their craft. There are no easy days. Kalepa's exceptional speed and determination are our biggest differentiators: this is how we win.
• Customer Focus - We will ruthlessly prioritize the work that drives our clients' growth, profitability, and efficiency. We are not building things just because they seem cool - we are here to solve our customers' most strategic problems.
• Meritocracy - Too many exceptional people are stifled by corporate bureaucracies. At Kalepa, those people excel - and we reward tremendous results with rapid promotions and compensation growth.
• Transparency - We are honest with each other. We don't believe in back-office politics and keeping employees in the dark. Transparency allows us to instantly cut to the heart of the matter and figure it out together.
• Experimentation - For many of the problems we face, no company has ever solved them before. We tackle these by quickly testing, measuring, and iterating to determine the path to success.

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).

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: $210K - $240K USD*

We are looking for an exceptional Tech Lead Manager to lead a team of world-class engineers building core Kalepa functionalities. We are looking for a deeply technical leader with significant experience in full-stack engineering who is excited to be hands-on and a 'player-coach'. The candidate will be responsible for setting strategy, for leading the team to deliver results consistently, for growing and developing talented engineers, and for cultivating a results-driven high-performance culture.

As part of the Core UX team, you will focus on refining existing product functionality to deliver an exceptional user experience. Your work will center on ensuring consistency across the product, maintaining a cohesive look and feel, and implementing performance improvements that directly impact end users. You'll be paying close attention to the layout, interactions, responsiveness, and visual polish, that collectively give the product a premium, well-crafted feel.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys iterative improvement, cares deeply about quality, and wants to shape the everyday experience of our users.

Note:
You will spend a lot of the time on the engineering work as this is a hands-on position (around 50% - coding).
You'll be right at home if you:

• Have 8+ years of relevant software engineering experience with at least 2 years of full-time engineering people management experience.
• Have experience managing complex projects that touch multiple teams and cross-functional partners.
• Have past success hiring talented engineers at different levels
• Have the ability to make the tradeoffs required to ship high-quality code while working within the constraints of a fast-growing company.
• Embody hustle and grit, you're excellent at your craft and relentless in pursuing it.
• 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.
• You have experience in a modern FE framework, preferably React.
• Have experience with serverless technologies (Lambda, EC2), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
• Are comfortable with relational databases, ideally Postgre
  
  SQL.
• Bonus: experience with LLMs/generative AI, distributed systems.

What you'll get:

• Competitive salary (based on experience level).
• Significant equity options…