Job Description
About Us and Position Overview
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.
The salary range for this role is $140,000-180,000
Why this role exists
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.
What success looks like
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
Core Responsibilities
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)
Essential Experience of a Successful Candidate
- 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
Be part of a mission-driven company tackling real-world challenges.
Work with a passionate and innovative team in a collaborative environment.
Opportunity to influence cutting-edge wildfire risk modeling in a dynamic industry.
Competitive salary and benefits package, including remote work.
This position is eligible for stock options (subject to board approval).
Our Kettle Inc. (“Kettle”) is an equal opportunity employer. Kettle provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.
