Backend Software Engineer

The Role
What You'll Own

You'll build the core backend systems that power Kepler's AI research platform: the agent orchestrator that coordinates AI workflows, the extraction and computation pipelines that process billions of data points with full provenance, and the infrastructure that financial professionals rely on for million-dollar decisions.

This role is for engineers who want to build foundational technology at the intersection of AI and finance, where your code directly impacts how clients make critical business decisions.

In the first few weeks you might:

• Build a new extraction pipeline for a data source we don't yet handle - with full provenance tagging and verification integrated from day one.
• Redesign how our agent orchestrator handles failures and retries so that a bad extraction from one source doesn't block the rest of a parallel workflow.
• Ship the service behind our source explorer that resolves any value in the product back to its exact origin in the original document.
• Add verification rules that cross-check extracted values across multiple sources and surface conflicts with full provenance on both sides.

In the longer term, you'll be given ownership of whole functional areas, from extending our platform to a new industry to leading new architecture as our infrastructure scales.

You'll consistently own systems end-to-end. In a small team, there's nobody to hand things off to.

How We Work

We're a close team, working together in an office in New York. We use AI tools heavily - Cursor, Claude Code, whatever makes us faster. Fluency is assumed. Our users are analysts at firms where a wrong number costs real money. The feedback loop on what you ship is hours, not quarters.

The pace is startup-fast but the engineering bar is high. We care about getting things right, not just getting things out. If you've worked somewhere that moves fast but ships broken software, this is different. If you've worked somewhere that's rigorous but slow, this is also different.

The team has strong backgrounds and low ego. We expect everyone to roll up their sleeves and handle the unglamorous problems: the weird regressions, the subtle bugs, the last minute debugging session before a demo. We move as a team, not as a collection of individuals.

Who You Are

You've shipped production systems and you care about whether they're correct - not just whether they work on the happy path. You think about failure modes before someone asks you to.

You're comfortable in a codebase you didn't write, moving between an orchestration service and a data pipeline in the same day. You're drawn to early-stage not for the title but because you want your work visible in the product, not abstracted behind three layers of management.

From the technical side:

• 5+ years building production software. No upper limit, comp scales with experience.
• Strong backend engineer. Our backend is Rust, but we don't require Rust experience. We believe strong engineering fundamentals and experience in other languages is what matters.
• You've built systems where correctness matters - payments, data infrastructure, healthcare, anything where a wrong output has consequences.
• You've built and operated distributed systems in production: concurrency, fault tolerance, retries, idempotency.
• You've worked with data at scale: large datasets, ETL pipelines, and the databases behind them.
• You're a quick learner and are as comfortable in a codebase you wrote as one you're reading for the first time.

From the personal side:

• You care what the analyst does with what you shipped, not whether the code was clever.
• You'd rather fix something than file a ticket about it.
• You'll tell someone their design has a flaw before the PR goes in, not after.
• You communicate before it's a problem, and when a teammate needs something from you, they don't have to ask twice.
• You know what it feels like when the plan changes twice in a day and the work still has to ship.

Don't check every box? Apply anyway. We prioritize problem-solving ability, systems thinking, and drive to build transformative agentic infrastructure.

Our Technical Stack

• Backend: Rust - agent orchestration, data extraction, computation pipelines.
• Frontend: TypeScript, React - the analyst workspace and verification interfaces.
• Data: PostgreSQL, plus direct integrations with official data sources.
• Infra: AWS.
• AI: Model-agnostic by design. We currently use Claude and GPT. The model is the replaceable part.

Mentorship & Growth

You'll be directly mentored by engineers who built Palantir's core systems. Expect:

• Weekly 1:1s with senior engineers who've built systems at Palantir and Meta scale.
• Deep architectural reviews and guidance on system design.
• Clear growth path toward technical leadership and system ownership.
• Learn by building production systems that power real financial research.

Working at Kepler
Our Benefits

• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families. HSA maxed by the company to the IRS limit.
• Automatic coverage for life, AD&D, and disability insurance.
• Daily lunch in office.
• Unlimited PTO policy.
• Development environment budget - latest MacBook Pro, multiple monitors, ergonomic setup, and any development tools you need.
• "Build anything" budget - dedicated funding for whatever tools, libraries, datasets, or infrastructure you need to solve technical challenges, no questions asked.
• Learning budget - attend any conference, course, or program that makes you better at what we're building.

Our Operating Principles

• Trust as the Default: People do their best work when confidence is mutual. We show our work, keep our promises, and flag risks before they bite. Trust isn't an aspiration - it's the baseline.
• Forward-Deployed with Product DNA: We own customer outcomes while building a product company. We don't win if they don't win.
• Extreme Ownership: If you notice a problem, you own it by making sure it doesn't fall through the cracks. Authority comes from initiative, not job titles. Once you step up, you're accountable for the outcome.
• Production-First Engineering: We design for critical workloads from day one. Durable execution, blue/green deploys, automated rollbacks, continuous delivery with end-to-end observability.
• Communicate with Intent: Great work disappears without great communication. We push information to the people who need it, when they need it. Silence is never the safe choice.
• Earn it Every Day: Your work speaks for itself. We create an environment where the best idea wins, the strongest work gets recognized, and everyone is held to the same high standard.
• Keep Raising the Bar: Great teams compound. Every hire raises the bar, every win gets named, every person gets the tools and runway to grow.