Senior Full-stack Software Engineer, Kettle
$140-180k
+ Stock options
ML-powered reinsurer for climate change risk
Job no longer available
ML-powered reinsurer for climate change risk
21-100 employees
Job no longer available
$140-180k
+ Stock options
21-100 employees
Company mission
To protect the world against climate change using deep learning and reinsurance.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
- 5+ years of professional software development experience, including ownership of production systems
- Strong experience in
- Operating production systems in AWS (ECS, EC2, Lambda, S3, IAM, RDS, etc.)
- DevOps practices: CI/CD, Docker, monitoring, reliability, security best practices
- Infrastructure-as-code and reproducible environments
- React / TypeScript frontend development
- Postgres and database-backed applications
- Experience in python development, including packaging and environment management
- You have demonstrated ability to:
- Own systems end-to-end, from design through deployment and ongoing operation
- Work effectively in small teams and ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Make pragmatic architectural trade-offs balancing speed, reliability, and scalability
- Improve engineering workflows, deployment processes, and overall system reliability
- Identify and proactively address infrastructure or operational bottlenecks before they become critical issues
What the job involves
- Kettle is a fast growing Managing General Agency (MGA) specializing in wildfire insurance combining advanced underwriting technology with deep industry experience
- We’re looking for a Senior Full-stack Software Engineer with strong DevOps experience and front-end abilities to join our engineering team
- In this role, you will architect, build, and maintain core systems across our AWS-based stack, contribute to front-end product development, and help scale Kettle’s engineering infrastructure as we grow
- This is a hands-on Senior IC role
- You’ll start by shipping and improving systems directly, with scope and ownership expanding as you ramp
- You’ll work closely with data engineering, modeling, risk, and product teams to deliver performant, reliable, and secure systems that support our underwriting platform and geospatial analytics tools
- As Kettle grows, our engineering systems are becoming more central to underwriting, mapping, and data science workflows
- We are a small, senior engineering team where backend and modeling capabilities are strong, but we are looking to further elevate our infrastructure, DevOps posture, and front-end tooling as our platform scales
- Today, much of the system works well and supports real underwriting decisions in production
- However, as usage increases, we need to improve deployment reliability, observability, infrastructure consistency, and the overall developer experience
- This role exists to help us proactively strengthen those foundations rather than reacting to scale challenges later
- We are looking for a senior engineer who can improve the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our AWS-based platform while also contributing to the internal tools and interfaces used by underwriting and risk teams every day
- This is a product-minded engineer who is comfortable across the stack, with primary strength in infrastructure, followed by front-end tooling, and backend systems
- You will have meaningful autonomy in shaping how we deploy, monitor, and evolve our systems, and will play a key role in raising the engineering bar as we grow
- In the first 6 months, you will:
- Improve observability, monitoring, and deployment reliability
- Ship meaningful improvements to internal dashboards and underwriting tools
- Become a key partner to data engineering and modeling teams for system reliability
- In 12 months, you will:
- Have materially improved our DevOps posture and developer workflows
- Be a go-to person for infrastructure and architecture decisions
- Help shape how new underwriting and mapping products are deployed and supported
- Raise the engineering standard across backend, infra, and internal tooling
- Primary Focus: Infrastructure & DevOps
- Improve parts of Kettle’s AWS infrastructure, CI/CD, and containerized workloads
- Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent)
- Improve observability, logging, monitoring, deployment reliability, and cost efficiency
- Secondary Focus: Front-end Tooling
- Build and maintain internal dashboards and tools in React/TypeScript
- Supporting Role: Back-end
- Contribute to architecture decisions across backend, infrastructure, and applications
- Design and maintain backend services and internal APIs (Python)
Our take
The evolving issue of wildfires has cost insurers in Western states dozens of billions of dollars over the past few years. Reinsurers, the firms that provide coverage to insurance companies in case of large events or disasters, have been struck just as hard. Kettle has developed a tech solution to help them combat the emerging and serious threat this poses to the industry.
The company has created an AI/ML solution to help reinsurers make more fine-grained predictions based on statistical models that look at over 7B data points from satellites, weather, MODIS, LIDAR, and ground truth. The idea is to both protect reinsurers from the worst payouts and to eventually shield consumers from exorbitant costs that are currently being passed down in the form of steeply rising insurance premiums.
This is a hot-button topic in Kettle’s California home turf, and if Kettle’s solution works out, it could prove a much-needed tonic to the sector. Much will pivot on how accurate its predictions are, which has provoked some scepticism from major insurers. However, Kettle has predicted the worst fires of the last two years with remarkable accuracy, which could prove the impetus needed to help it gather momentum.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Nov 2021
$25m
SERIES A
Oct 2020
$4.8m
SEED
Total funding: $29.8m
Company benefits
- Stock: Ownership in a fast-growing venture-backed company
- 401k matching: We care about your ability to save for your future
- Family Focus: Parental leave and flexibility for families
- Time Off: Flexible vacation policy to encourage people to get out and see the world
- Healthcare: Platinum level Medical, dental, and vision policies
- Goodies: Whatever hardware and software you need to get the job done
- Team Fun: Regularly scheduled events, annual retreat, and celebrations
- Learning: Learning & Development Opportunities to grow your skills and career
- Great team: Working with fun, hard-working, kind people committed to making a difference!
- Flexible culture: We are results-focused. We don’t work at the office every day
Company HQ
Kensington, CA
Leadership
Nathaniel Manning
(Co-Founder & Senior Advisor)Previously a Finance Associate for Clean Energy at the Clinton Foundation. After time serving as CEO of Fellow Robots, spent time at The White House as Special Advisor on Open Data at USAID, and meanwhile spent over 7 years as CEO of Ushahidi.
Son Le
(Co-Founder & CTO)Originally a Quantitative Researcher at AXA Advisors, and then worked as a Machine Learning Quant at Argo Group, ultimately taking up a Head Quant Engineer role there.
Andrew Engler
(Co-Founder & Board Member)Served as COO at Allstate, then its Commercial Field Sales Leader. Following that, served as VP of Digital Product and Machine Learning at Argo Group.
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