Job Description

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: $210K – $240K USD*

We are looking for an exceptional Tech Lead Manager to lead a team of world-class engineers building core Kalepa functionalities. We are looking for a deeply technical leader with significant experience in backend engineering who is excited to be hands-on and a ‘player-coach’. The candidate will be responsible for setting strategy, for leading the team to deliver results consistently, for growing and developing talented engineers, and for cultivating a results-driven high-performance culture.

As part of the Client Integrations team, you will work on the external-facing APIs that power our customers’ core workflows. Your day-to-day will involve designing and building API endpoints, improving database and query performance, and integrating with a wide range of third-party services. You’ll translate product requirements into reliable business logic, help diagnose and resolve customer issues, and contribute to making our platform faster, more stable, and easier to use.

Note: You will spend a lot of the time on the engineering work as this is a hands-on position (around 50% - coding).

You’ll be right at home if you:

Have 8+ years of relevant software engineering experience with at least 2 years of full-time engineering people management experience.
Have experience managing complex projects that touch multiple teams and cross-functional partners.
Have past success hiring talented engineers at different levels
Have the ability to make the tradeoffs required to ship high-quality code while working within the constraints of a fast-growing company.
Embody hustle and grit, you’re excellent at your craft and relentless in pursuing it.
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.
401(k) plan with employer match (regardless of employee contribution)
Excellent benefits: 100% covered medical, 100% covered vision and dental for individuals and families, and others
Work with an ambitious, smart, global, and fun team to transform a $1T global industry.
20 days of PTO a year
Global team offsites (2021 - Playa del Carmen, 2022 - Rome, 2023 - Buenos Aires, 2024 - Lisbon, 2025 - Cartagena)
Healthy living/gym stipend. Mobile phone bill stipend.
Continuing education credits.

* 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.