Staff Backend Software Engineer - Kalepa for Operations

Role overview Set technical direction and deliver backend systems that apply language models to complex insurance workflows. The work spans AI pipelines, core services, data models, and external APIs, with responsibility for making high-stakes automated insights dependable, explainable, and efficient at scale.

Responsibilities - Lead major backend initiatives, from project planning and architecture through implementation and operation. - Design and scale language-model systems and asynchronous data pipelines, balancing reliability, evaluation quality, latency, cost, and explainability. - Make architecture decisions across services and products, and guide development, testing, deployment practices, and code reviews. - Deliver product improvements while managing technical debt and identifying opportunities that cross service boundaries. - Work with product and business partners to assess evidence, constraints, and tradeoffs; communicate decisions to engineers and leaders. - Support team growth through technical guidance, recruiting, and training, and use AI tools thoughtfully to improve engineering work.

Requirements - At least eight years building and operating backend systems at scale, including technical leadership on a major project. - Production experience with language models and a practical understanding of deploying them at scale. - Strong Python skills or comparable experience in another object-oriented language. - Experience with AWS, serverless services, asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments. - Strong relational database design and performance tuning skills, ideally with PostgreSQL. - Ownership, sound judgment under ambiguity, and clear, proactive communication across technical and business teams.

Nice to have Experience with large document-processing pipelines, distributed systems, external APIs or third-party integrations, or insurance, fintech, and other regulated data-heavy fields.

Benefits and work setup The position is primarily remote. The listing describes equity options, 20 days of annual paid time off, team gatherings, fitness and mobile phone stipends, and continuing education support. For US employees, it lists medical, vision, and dental coverage and an employer contribution to a retirement plan. Compensation varies by location and experience; stated ranges are $246,000–$314,000 in New York and San Francisco and $222,000–$314,000 elsewhere in the US and Canada.