What's It Like to Work at Kepler ?

In one memorable line, how would you describe day-to-day satisfaction on your team?

Hard problems, shipped in days, with people I'd choose to be around.

Would you recommend working here — and what proof backs that up? 

Yes, and the proof I trust most is who keeps showing up. A good chunk of this team worked together at Palantir and chose to do it again here; people who could work almost anywhere, picking the same room twice. Hiring runs heavily on personal referral, which only happens when people will put their own name behind the place. We're too small for a formal eNPS, but the honest version is the engineers here turned down easier, better-paid options to build something they think matters and they're still here.

How are you perceived externally right now and what signals support that?

The clearest signal is inbound pull. Anthropic published a piece on how we built Kepler, they don't do that for model-wrappers and respected buy-side names came to us. And it's spreading past finance; people in other industries saw the same trust problem and asked if we could point the platform at theirs. We're becoming the team known for making AI outputs verifiable and it's landing before we've chased anything.

What defines a great employee experience at Kepler?

The simple answer is that the best experience is letting our team work on genuinely hard problems with as little nonsense interrupting as possible. The team here left exceptionally strong and stable jobs because they wanted to work on something fascinating and challenging — making an AI tool people can actually trust. That’s the draw. My job is to keep it that way and get everything else out of the way from between a person and the interesting version of their job.

In practice that means engineers sit in customer calls instead of getting handed specs. Titles are flat, so nobody’s optimizing for a promotion cycle. If you notice something broken, you own it, and you don’t need permission to go fix it.

It also means paying for the boring stuff properly. Health insurance is 100 percent covered for employees and their families. The expense policy is one sentence. Nobody here should lose a Tuesday afternoon to an approval workflow.

How do you measure and act on employee feedback?

Less measuring than you’d expect. If you’re running a survey to find out what’s wrong at our size, you’ve already built a company where people don’t just tell you.

What we’ve actually built is the expectation that changing the company is part of everyone’s job. Nothing here is load-bearing just because a founder said it. Process, tooling, how we scope work, what meetings exist — all of it is up for renegotiation by whoever is closest to the problem. If something is slowing you down, you don’t file a ticket about it. You change it and tell people afterward.

Our offsite is the loud version of that. We put every complaint on the board, including the ones aimed at the founders, and rewrote a chunk of how we work off the back of it. But it only worked because it wasn’t unusual. It was the same conversation we have on a normal Tuesday, with a whiteboard and better snacks. The signal I actually watch is whether people are still pitching how to change things. They stop only if they watch several go nowhere.

The Cultural Rituals That Make Kepler’s Workplace Unique

• “No meetings Tuesdays and Thursdays: We have two full days where an engineer can hold an entire problem in their head without something breaking it at 2 p.m. Defending those two days is most of my job.”
• “Every meeting defaults to 15 minutes. If you want 30, you have to say why. Almost nothing needs 30, and the handful of things that genuinely do are obvious in advance.”
• “Be kind, which sounds like a poster until you make it specific. Ours is: If you’re frustrated with someone’s work, that’s a 15-minute call, not a Slack thread. Written disagreement between smart people escalates on its own. Voices don’t.”
• “Then, the nice one. We feed people properly, and dog-friendly is a hard requirement in the office we’re looking at right now because one of our engineers has a dog named Wagyu.”