Senior Backend Software Engineer, Kalepa

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating backend systems in production
• Know Python (our main stack), though we're open to strong candidates from other OO backgrounds
• Experience with AWS and serverless technologies (Lambda, Step Functions), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments
• Strong knowledge of relational databases and their performance tuning, ideally PostgreSQL
• Mastery of software development fundamentals: system design, debugging, testing, and problem-solving
• Experience building external-facing APIs or designing integrations with third-party systems
• You take full ownership of your work and drive projects to completion with minimal oversight
• You communicate proactively: surfacing blockers, asking the right questions, keeping stakeholders in the loop
• You thrive on experimentation: comfortable testing ideas, measuring results, and iterating quickly on problems no one has solved before
• You're excited by problems others are struggling with

Desirable

• We're looking for strong backend engineers who love building reliable systems around fragmented, high-value data
• Kalepa's platform ingests billions of highly unstructured data points every day, extracts precise information from them, and surfaces the insights insurers rely on for high-stakes decisions
• As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll own strategically important, complex pieces of that system with minimal oversight: the services, data models, pipelines, and evals at its center, and the external-facing APIs that power our customers' core workflows
• You'll work at the intersection of AI and backend engineering, on a problem the industry hasn't solved effectively yet
• You'll join a high-ownership team responsible for some of Kalepa's most business-critical infrastructure, and you'll help the engineers around you do their best work
• This team is a mix of software engineers owning Kalepa’s IT integration platform (public APIs, control plane) and forward-deployed engineers who embed with clients to integrate atop Kalepa’s APIs
• The team is tasked with ensuring Kalepa’s deployments are complete, high-quality, and conducive to self-service
• The team will define clear criteria for deployment quality and build processes that raise that quality standard for every client
• Where the codebase today limits extensibility, they plan and refactor for sustainability
• Ownership areas: Kalepa’s Public APIs and external docs; auth/SSO/permissions; control plane & admin tooling for configuring clients; adapters into external systems that build against Kalepa’s Public API
• Lead the scoping, design, and delivery of complex backend systems in Python on AWS: services, data models, and asynchronous pipelines
• Build and scale LLM-based systems that process large volumes of unstructured documents and data with precision and explainability
• Design external-facing APIs and integrations with third-party systems that customers depend on
• Own database and query performance as data volume grows; proactively manage technical debt
• Contribute to architectural discussions and decisions across the entire product, and iterate with teams to modify and prioritize within the development effort
• Accurately estimate your work, consistently meet deadlines, and help others estimate theirs
• Take a leading role in incident and bug resolution; be the strong debugger others turn to
• Lead the adoption of best practices for development, testing, and deployment
• Mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback
• Use AI tooling deliberately to multiply your own output and quality