Platform Engineering Tech Lead, UnderwriteMe
1+ day a week in office (Tower Bridge, London )
Building software products for the life insurance market
Open for applications
Building software products for the life insurance market
101-200 employees
Open for applications
1+ day a week in office (Tower Bridge, London )
101-200 employees
Company mission
Using tech to ensure everyone who wants life insurance can access it.
Role
Who you are
- The role requires an in-depth understanding of AWS, IaC and automation
- The technical lead will be someone who thrives on being given problems to solve and the autonomy, ownership and support to apply their creative thinking to these problems
- Experience in line management and fostering high-performance cross-functional teams within dynamic environments
- Identify skills gaps in team members and work with the Engineering Manager to build training plans
- Experience working within a regulated industry
- Hands on experience managing AWS and Kubernetes
- Previous experience with ISO audits
- The ability to showcase a proven history of enabling teams to self serve within a regulated industry
- Solid understanding of CI/CD best practices
- Possess excellent written, oral, and interpersonal communication skills
- Confident presenting ideas to a mixture of technical and non-technical audiences
- Hold a degree in Computer Science with a proven track record in a technical leadership role
- Hold current AWS & Kubernetes certifications
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Kubernetes & Docker
- Terraform
- GitLab
- DataDog
- Solid understanding of GitOps
- Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
- Understanding of software delivery lifecycle
- Capacity management & planning
Desirable
- Has worked previously in a start-up, Scale-up. Or Saas environment
- Experience support JVM application
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Platform Engineering Tech Lead to spearhead the engineering squad and enhance our internal developer platform
- As a Tech Lead you will provide technical guidance and leadership to improve the developer experience
- You will work closely with software engineers to improve speed of delivery and reduce friction for engineering teams to ship their products
- You will use metrics to drive decision making and track the impact of change
- As a Tech Lead you will assume responsibility for quality, completeness, and accuracy of the teams work
- You are excited by the challenge of understanding engineering problems and converting these to solutions that support our next generation of product and data initiatives
- Propose and evaluate solutions for design challenges, leveraging your expertise to identify and assess new technologies and third-party components
- Work with technical architects to ensure you are contributing to the strategic alignment of technical decisions
- Lead the team in designing, building, maintaining, and supporting a high-quality platform
- Identify areas for improvement and create proposals for enhancements
- Collaborate with software engineers to reduce friction and allow teams to ship the products faster
- Advocate for and establish standards within the team and the broader tech community
- Address operational aspects, prioritizing concerns such as technical debt, non-functional requirements, and the production environment's performance
- Ensure cloud compliance against ISO & CIS benchmarks
- Monitor cloud costs and drive for optimization
- Participate actively in an agile environment, supporting deployments when necessary
- Be part of the out of hours on call rota, supporting a range of products
- Willing to support out of hours releases when required
Salary benchmarks
Our take
UnderwriteMe was founded in 2012 to shake up the UK insurance sector. At the time, life insurance underwriting was an inefficient process typified by a fractured market, slow processes, and non-standardised evidence. UnderwriteMe released its Underwriting Engine which untangled and greatly accelerated the process, allowing it to grow to become the leading provider of insurance tech products across Europe, Asia, and North America.
As a tech-first company, UnderwriteMe has continued to develop its product, innovating to remain at the forefront of the insurance tech sector. It has moved into AI, with its Text Mining Lab that uses natural language processing to read unstructured medical reports and automatically convert them into usable data. It has also formed major strategic partnerships to improve the product, one example being with United Healthcare Group, allowing medical screening requests to be sent electronically. This further shortens the underwriting decision-making process for users of the platform.
Its focus on innovation and strategic partnerships has yielded success, generating significant buzz in the insurance sector and more than 50% year-on-year growth. Moving ahead it will continue to develop its product, doubling down on AI-augmented decision-making tools to further increase the efficiency of the underwriting process.
Kirsty
Company Specialist
Insights
Company
Employee endorsements
Career progression
"Still being fairly small (150 people) and scaling means people can make an impact and be involved in projects, uncover new opportunities and..."
Company benefits
- Life Assurance - The Company provides a lump sum benefit payment, 9x salary
- Group Income Protection - The aim is to provide an income to employees if they are unable to work long-term, as a result of an illness or injury. 75% of basic salary
- Private Medical Insurance - Provided for all employees via Bupa Healthcare
- Stakeholder Pension Scheme - Up to 15%. The Company offers a group stakeholder pension to aid employees in planning for their future
- Money towards remote setup - £350 for you to be set up and comfortable working remotely
- Employee Assistance Programme - Providing employees with third-party advice on a variety of topics including mental health
- Subsidised Gym Membership - The company subsidises memberships to any gym of employees' choice
- Enhanced Maternity and Paternity scheme
- Bonus Scheme - based on individual and company performance
- 30 days a year working remotely - The opportunity to work abroad or from your home country (for those who may have moved country). This can be broken up through the year
- 24/7 GP Consultation - Through the Employee Assistance Programme, WeCare, employees and their families have access to a UK-based GP anytime it's needed
- Cycle 2 Work Scheme - Enables employees to purchase cycling equipment tax-free by paying for it in installments through salary sacrifice deductions
- 25 days holiday plus company closure for wellbeing days (4x extra days off in 2023)
Company values
- Ethical & Trustworthy: We always do the right thing, even if it’s hard – by our people, our clients and our community
- Brave: We start with the problem, not the solution – we experiment and innovate. We seek and welcome feedback – it’s how we grow
- Resilient: Wellbeing comes first – we look out for and after each other. We fail together, we learn together, we succeed together
- Accountable: We focus on impact over activity. We measure what matters – we measure the right thing, not everything
- Inclusive & Collaborative: We help each other solve problems – good ideas can come from anyone and anywhere. Everyone can be themselves and is valued here
Company HQ
St Katharine's & Wapping, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
James Tait
(CEO, not founder)Was a Non-Executive Director at UnderwriteMe before stepping up to the CEO position in 2020. Before that was Head of Protection, Europe for UnderwriteMe's parent company, Pacific Life Re.
Diversity & Inclusion at UnderwriteMe
Nana (Gyasi)
- Fostering cultural awareness in our organisation
- Enhancing the diversity within our Underwrite Me team
- Reviving our learning curriculum to enhance DE&I knowledge
- Building on our existing affinity groups and DE&I initiatives
- Optimising our hiring practices and removing bias
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