Staff Applied AI Engineer - Kalepa for Underwriting

The role

You will set the technical direction for turning unstructured insurance data into structured facts at scale. You will own the architecture, evaluation infrastructure, and model strategy for LLM-based extraction, classification, and matching systems.

What you will do

• Lead technical, data, and project aspects of applied AI initiatives including document extraction and classification
• Set technical direction for building and operating LLM-based systems at scale
• Lead architectural decisions across data science and the backend
• Own the evaluation infrastructure including benchmark datasets and validation strategies
• Deliver product and data science innovations that tie model outputs to customer value
• Lead model and vendor strategy regarding adoption, fine-tuning, and pipeline replacement
• Partner with product and business owners to drive firm-wide decisions
• Manage technical debt and lead code reviews
• Act as an ambassador for Kalepa in recruiting and training
• Use AI tooling to multiply impact

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience
• 5+ years building and operating ML or LLM systems in production
• Delivered as the technical lead on at least one major applied AI initiative or product
• Deep expertise in LLM-based systems: structured extraction, classification, retrieval and embeddings, evaluation, and engineering for scale
• Mastery of applied machine learning, NLP, and statistics
• Mastery of Python and its data and ML libraries
• Experience with AWS and serverless technologies (Lambda, EC2), asynchronous workflows, and cloud environments
• Consistently a go-to resource for engineering, product, and business staff in technical matters
• Take full ownership of work and drive initiatives to completion with minimal oversight
• Communicate proactively and persuasively with engineers, product, and leadership
• Thrive on experimentation

Nice to have

• Experience with document AI at scale: OCR, layout understanding, long-document and multi-page extraction
• Experience fine-tuning or distilling models for production use
• Experience building evaluation platforms or ML infrastructure used by other teams
• Familiarity with insurance, underwriting, or submission documents such as ACORD forms and loss runs

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Significant equity options package
• 20 days of PTO a year
• Global team offsites
• Healthy living/gym stipend
• Mobile phone bill stipend
• Continuing education credits
• 100% covered medical for individuals and families (US only)
• 100% covered vision and dental for individuals and families (US only)
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution (US only)

About the company

Kalepa is building AI that can perform professional labor in the insurance industry. They create professional-grade AI systems for insurers to read, reason, decide, and act inside real workflows.