Staff Backend Engineer - New Products (Europe)
$145k - $185k USD
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 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.
About the role:
Salary range: $145k – $185k USD*
We are looking for smart engineers who love to code, seek challenging problems, and appreciate recognition for excellent work. As part of the New Products team, you will help bring an entirely new suite of capabilities into our product. Your work will range from building quick prototypes to preparing polished feature demos that showcase what’s possible. You’ll iterate rapidly, test ideas early, and embrace a “move fast and break things” mindset to explore new opportunities. This role involves experimenting with features that can expand our total addressable market, validating assumptions, and turning promising concepts into practical, shippable solutions.
You'll join a small, high-ownership group with the autonomy to drive innovation and directly influence how AI transforms an entire industry. Your contributions will have an outsized impact on both our technology and our business.
You'll be right at home if you:
- Have 8+ years of software engineering experience, ideally with time spent building features from the ground up.
- 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.
- Know Python (our main stack), though we're open to strong candidates from other OO backgrounds.
- Have experience with serverless technologies (Lambda, EC2), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments.
- Are comfortable with relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL.
- Bonus: experience with LLMs/generative AI, distributed systems.
What you’ll get:
- Competitive salary (based on experience level)*.
- Significant equity options package.
- Work with an ambitious, smart, global, and fun team to transform a $1T global industry.
- 20 days of PTO a year.
- Global team offsites.
- Gym reimbursement. Phone reimbursement.
- Student stipend.
*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.