Director of Engineering - Core Product (New York)

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. 

About the role:

Salary range: $260K - $350K USD*

Location: New York, NY (Hybrid)

Kalepa is looking for an exceptional Director of Engineering to lead and grow Kalepa’s Core Product team. We are looking for a deeply technical leader with extensive experience in full-stack engineering who is excited to partner closely with the executive team and cross-functional leaders to shape the future of Kalepa’s product. You will be responsible for defining the architectural roadmap, setting strategy, driving engineering operational excellence, and cultivating a high-performance, results-driven culture that consistently delivers exceptional value to Kalepa’s clients.

As part of the Core Product team, you will establish the frameworks, engineering standards, and cross-functional cadences to power Kalepa’s cutting-edge platform which augments human underwriters and orchestrates AI underwriters to deliver rapid and profitable growth to the world’s largest insurers. You will bridge the gap between product vision and technical execution, ensuring our technology investments directly drive business impact and long-term business growth. This role is ideal for someone who cares deeply about quality, is actively rethinking the way that software is built and shipped, and wants to shape the way Kalepa impacts the most critical decisions made at the largest insurance companies.

About you:

• You have 10+ years of relevant software engineering experience with at least 3 years of full-time engineering people management experience, ideally including experience managing managers and scaling organizations.
• You are known for rethinking the way that engineering is done and feel right at home managing both human and AI agents, while ensuring quality and reliability.
• You have a proven track record of driving complex, large-scale engineering initiatives and aligning technical strategy with broader company objectives.
• You are an excellent recruiter of top-tier engineering talent and somebody who exceptional software engineers want to work with.
• You have the ability to make the tradeoffs required to ship high-quality code while working within the constraints of a fast-growing company.
• You drive operational excellence by championing metrics-driven decision-making and implementing robust engineering practices.
• You thrive on experimentation: you're comfortable testing ideas, measuring results, and iterating quickly on problems no one has solved before.
• You have deep architectural expertise and a strong foundation in system design, distributed systems, and scalable infrastructure.
• You have experience overseeing and scaling platforms utilizing serverless technologies (Lambda, EC2), asynchronous workflows, and modern cloud environments.

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 $7T 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.