Lead Designer

Salary range: $125k – $165k 

Equity range: 0.01% to 0.1%

What We’re Looking For:

Kalepa is looking for an exceptional Lead Designer with 5+ years of experience to take our marquee AI-powered Underwriting Copilot to the next level. We are a remote-friendly, fast-growing, and highly capital efficient startup that is building software to transform and disrupt commercial insurance and that already powers critical and daily underwriting decisions at companies such as Nationwide, Arch Insurance, Munich Re, and Bowhead Specialty. Kalepa is headquartered in New York City.

We believe that strong design and empathy are foundational to reimagining commercial insurance and critical in building AI-centric products. Underwriters have a difficult mandate: balancing speed-to-quote and strong customer relationships with accurate and thorough analysis of risks. Legacy software in the industry has lacked customer focus, usability, and, ultimately, true value creation. This is, unfortunately, also true of most emerging AI platforms which provide point solutions for problems and do not address the complexity necessary to truly help underwriters have a delightful experience while leading the insurers that employ them to deliver outstanding growth and profitability.

Kalepa’s Copilot is the only solution in the market that delivers real, tangible, and measurable value from AI in commercial insurance. Our clients experience increases of 30-100% in premium (revenue) growth and improvements of up to 10% in profitability – within weeks of using Copilot. This is the result of an unwavering focus on delivering the best product in the market – one designed to meet all the underwriters’ needs and which drives real business KPIs. 

Kalepa’s Lead Designer will have a broad remit across UX design, UX research, and product management to drive this vision forward and position underwriters to be far more impactful in their work. This is a hands-on position tasked with helping take our already successful Copilot product – used to underwrite billions of dollars of policies a year -- to the next level. 

About you:

• You have a minimum of 5+ years of experience designing, building, and managing software products and are familiar with an iterative design process and best practices for product development. 

• You love to hustle: finding ways to get things done, destroying obstacles, and never taking no for an answer. The words “it can’t be done” don’t exist in your vocabulary.

• You have a strong UX/UI portfolio that demonstrates clear understanding of user, business, and tech context, ideally with productivity, data/analytics-heavy, and/or B2B applications.

• You are a systems thinker. You can solve problems across a feature set or across a full experience, not just story-by-story. You think about how business requirements map to rules within features.

• You embrace complexity. You are unfazed by complicated requirements, highly analytical, and data-heavy products. 

• You have deep empathy and can quickly pick up on nuanced processes. You can understand the needs of users and internal stakeholders to align everyone's goals. We expect you to know our users’ needs like the back of your hand within weeks.

• You have a passion for typography, information hierarchy, interaction design, composition, and usability heuristics. You find clunky and aesthetically deficient experiences painful.

• You value a well-designed UI system and consistency in design patterns and user workflows.

• You are proactive in identifying design and product improvement opportunities and learning about our users’ needs independently.

• You have experience with design and collaboration tools

• You value open, frank, and respectful communication.

As a plus:

• Experience with AI products

• InsurTech or FinTech experience

• Experience at a venture-backed startup during hypergrowth

• A technical background. You may have been or considered being a technical product manager or engineer at some point, 

What you’ll get:

• Competitive salary (based on experience level)

• Equity options package

• Work with an ambitious, smart, global, and fun team to transform a $1T global industry

• Ground floor opportunity – Lead Designer at a rapidly growing startup with marquee clients and exceptional unit economics.

• Excellent benefits: 100% covered medical, 100% covered vision and dental, and others

• 20 days of PTO a year

• Global team offsites

Kalepa's team members bring experience from top technology companies including Meta, Google, Amazon, Palantir, Mastercard, and Uber. Kalepa is backed by IA Ventures (early investors in Datadog, Wise, Better, Digital Ocean, TheTradeDesk, Flatiron Health, Komodo Health, etc.); former Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker’s Inspired Capital; and leaders in financial services and technology, including Gokul Rajaram from Doordash, Coinbase, and Square, Jackie Reses from Square, Affirm, and Lead Bank, and Henry Ward from Carta.