Senior Backend Engineer – Submission Processing Team

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.

Success at Kalepa is bred from five core principles:

• Hustle and Determination – We hire people who take full ownership of their craft and relentlessly pursue excellence with speed and determination. We choose the hard problems and do not give up. This is the foundation of how we work and how we win.
• Deliver Customer Impact – We’re obsessed with customer impact. Every feature, every line of code, every decision is measured against one question: does this help insurers make better decisions? If it doesn’t drive speed, accuracy, or profitability for our customers, we don’t build it.
• Meritocracy – We’re building something exceptional, and that requires exceptional people and ideas. We have a high bar but we reward excellence with rapid growth. If you’re the best at what you do, you’ll thrive here.
• Transparency – We value honest, transparent communication over politics. We challenge ideas, not people. We say what needs to be said, even when it’s hard. This is how we solve problems fast and find the truth.
• Experiment Relentlessly – Many of the problems we face have never been solved before. We tackle them by testing quickly, measuring rigorously, and iterating until we find the path forward. Speed of learning is our advantage.

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.

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.

• 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…