Senior Backend Engineer - Submission Processing Team

Position: Senior Backend Engineer - Submission Processing Team (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: $170k - $210k USD*

We are looking for smart engineers who love to code, seek challenging problems, and appreciate recognition for excellent work. As part of the Submission Processing team, you will work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering - this is core R&D work, not routine development. Your day-to-day will involve building LLM-based solutions that process millions of insurance documents at scale, extracting precise information about companies and synthesizing it into a complete picture of the insured.

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.

You'll collaborate with a global team of full-stack, data, ML, and Dev Ops engineers to build scalable backend solutions as we continue to grow. We're a small team where individual contributions have an outsized impact on both our technology and our business.
You'll be right at home if you:

• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience with deep Python expertise.
• 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.
• Have worked with LLMs in production and understand what it takes to deploy them at scale.
• Are fluent with coding agents and AI-assisted development - you don't just tolerate AI tools, you actively push their boundaries.
• Have experience with AWS and serverless technologies (Lambda, EC2), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
• Are comfortable with relational databases, ideally Postgre
  
  SQL.
• Are excited by R&D and want to solve problems others are still struggling with.

What you'll get:

• Competitive salary (based on experience level).
• Significant equity options package.
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution (regardless of employee contribution)
• Excellent benefits: 100% covered medical, 100% covered vision and dental, and others.
• Work with an ambitious, smart, global, and fun team to transform a $1T global industry.
• 20 days of PTO a year.
• Global team offsites (2021 - Playa del Carmen, 2022 - Rome, 2023 - Buenos Aires, 2024 - Lisbon)
• Healthy living/gym stipend. Mobile phone…