Senior Full-stack Engineer with DevOps Expertise

About Us and Position Overview

Kettle is an innovative Managing General Agency (MGA) dedicated to offering wildfire insurance through advanced underwriting technology combined with extensive industry expertise.

We are eagerly seeking a Senior Full-stack Engineer who has robust DevOps experience and strong front-end skills to become a vital part of our engineering team. In this hands-on role, you will be instrumental in architecting, building, and maintaining core systems within our AWS-driven environment. As you settle into the position, you will contribute to both front-end product development and the scaling of Kettle's engineering infrastructure.

Your collaboration will span across data engineering, modeling, risk, and product teams to create reliable, secure, and efficient systems that bolster our underwriting platform and geospatial analytics tools. The anticipated salary range for this role is $140,000-$180,000.

Why This Role Exists

As Kettle progresses, our engineering systems are increasingly essential to underwriting, mapping, and data science workflows. We are a tight-knit, senior engineering team with solid backend and modeling capabilities, seeking to enhance our infrastructure, DevOps practices, and front-end tools as our platform evolves.

Currently, while our systems operate effectively to support real-time underwriting decisions, there is a need to enhance deployment reliability, observability, infrastructure consistency, and the overall developer experience. This position aims to proactively strengthen these foundations to avoid reactive measures as we face scaling challenges down the line.

We are looking for a seasoned engineer dedicated to improving the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of our AWS-based platform, while also shaping the tools and interfaces used daily by our underwriting and risk teams.

What Success Looks Like

In the First 6 Months, You Will

• Enhance observability, monitoring, and deployment reliability.
• Deliver significant improvements to internal dashboards and underwriting tools.
• Become a key partner for data engineering and modeling teams to ensure system reliability.

In 12 Months, You Will

• Substantially improve our DevOps processes and developer workflows.
• Be recognized as a go-to resource for infrastructure and architectural decisions.
• Influence the deployment and support of new underwriting and mapping products.
• Elevate engineering standards across backend, infrastructure, and internal tooling.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Focus: Infrastructure & DevOps

• Enhance various components of Kettle's AWS infrastructure, CI/CD, and container workloads.
• Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar).
• Boost observability, logging, monitoring, deployment reliability, and cost efficiency.

Secondary Focus: Front-end Tooling

• Create and maintain internal dashboards and tools using React and TypeScript.

Supporting Role: Back-end

• Contribute to architecture decisions across backend, infrastructure, and applications.
• Design and maintain backend services and internal APIs using Python.

Requirements

Essential Experience of a Successful Candidate

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of professional software development experience, including overseeing production systems.

Strong Experience in

• Managing production systems in AWS (ECS, EC2, Lambda, S3, IAM, RDS, etc.).
• Applying DevOps practices: CI/CD, Docker, monitoring, reliability, and security best practices.
• Utilizing infrastructure-as-code for reproducible environments.
• Developing frontend applications using React/TypeScript.
• Working with Postgres and database-backed applications.
• Creating Python applications, including packaging and environment management.

You Have Demonstrated Ability To

• Take ownership of systems end-to-end, from design through deployment and ongoing operation.
• Collaborate effectively in small teams and navigate fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, and scalability.
• Enhance engineering workflows, deployment processes, and overall system reliability.
• Proactively identify and resolve infrastructure or operational bottlenecks before they escalate into major issues.

Work Authorization

• We are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this role. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.

Benefits

• Join a mission-driven company tackling real-world challenges.
• Collaborate with an enthusiastic and innovative team in a supportive environment.
• Have a chance to influence groundbreaking wildfire risk modeling in a dynamic industry.
• Receive a competitive salary and benefits package, which includes remote work options.
• This position qualifies for stock options (subject to board approval).

Kettle Inc. is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing equitable employment opportunities to all individuals and prohibiting discrimination and harassment based on race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.