Junior Backend Engineer (Europe)

About Kalepa:

Insurance is a $7T global industry built on professional labor: underwriting, claims, pricing, operations, and distribution. Kalepa is building AI that can perform that work.

We create professional-grade AI systems for insurers: software that can read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows and operate over long-time horizons. Kalepa begins by augmenting professionals with the tools to succeed at their jobs. That earns us the right to learn from real decisions, capture decision traces, and automate what can be automated successfully over time.

Our products are already in production with leading insurers, driving measurable outcomes and expanding across functions. The opportunity is far broader than any single workflow: to build the AI operating system for decision-making across insurance. For people who want to work on AI that matters, in a sector where correctness, trust, and real-world impact count, Kalepa is just getting started.

Kalepa is backed by leading investors such as IA Ventures and Inspired Capital, and our team brings experience from Facebook, Palantir, Google, Amazon, McKinsey, 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.

Salary range: $60k – $70k USD*

We are looking for smart engineers who love to code, seek challenging problems, and appreciate recognition for excellent work.

As an engineer at Kalepa, you'll work on real product and R&D systems at the intersection of software engineering and applied AI. You will contribute to backend services, data and ML pipelines that support our product used by commercial insurance underwriters.

You'll help build and improve systems that ingest, process, and reason over large volumes of structured and unstructured data, including documents, third-party sources, and model outputs. This is hands-on engineering work on problems that matter to the business, with ownership of features end to end.

You'll collaborate closely with experienced full-stack, backend, ML, and platform engineers, and you'll be expected to contribute to how production systems are designed, built, tested, and operated at scale. We're a small team where individual contributions have an outsized impact on both our technology and our business.

You'll Be a Good Fit If You:

• Have approximately 1 year of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production systems
• Have strong fundamentals in at least one programming language and know Python
• Have a degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Enjoy writing code and solving non-trivial technical problems
• Are curious about AI, data, and real-world applications of machine learning
• Take ownership and are comfortable working with ambiguity
• Move fast, learn quickly, and value high standards
• Appreciate direct feedback, meritocracy, and transparency

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary based on experience level*
• Significant equity options package
• Direct work on core systems at a fast-growing AI startup, with a steep learning curve
• Fully remote work from Europe
• Onsite …