Senior Backend Engineer , Cuvva
£95-100k
+ Share Options
1-4 days a week in office (Farringdon, London)
Car insurance
Be an early applicant
Car insurance
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
£95-100k
+ Share Options
1-4 days a week in office (Farringdon, London)
101-200 employees
Company mission
We are making cars multiplayer 🚙 We’re creating truly flexible products that meet people’s real needs. Cuvva is building the future of insurance every day.
Role
Who you are
- A strong background in Golang and AWS infrastructure, with experience working in production environments
- Familiarity with Terraform, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes and Redis with bonus points for NodeJS. A track record of using automation to reduce toil, increase delivery speed and cut down operational costs. Familiarity with continuous integration tools like ArgoCD
- Experience with system reliability and performance optimisation, and know what it takes to scale backend systems responsibly
- A strategic mindset, you think in terms of platforms, not just products, and value long-term thinking over quick wins
- An understanding that great engineering also means being a great teammate – clear communication, respect for others’ time, and sharing what you know
- An eye for continuous improvement, both in our systems and our processes. You’re proactive, curious, and not afraid to challenge the status quo
What the job involves
- Our backend is made up of many standalone services with a JSON-based RPC interface
- We aim to create a client-agnostic API design suitable for a variety of clients (mobile apps, website, internal tooling, 3rd parties)
- Because we’re a regulated financial company, we have interesting and rigorous requirements to meet with regards to data security and auditability
- The majority of our systems are written in Go
- A few older ones are NodeJS, backed by either PostgreSQL or MongoDB and are hosted in a container environment
- We heavily lean on AWS infrastructure, and occasionally build integrations with third-party systems in the insurance industry
- As a Senior Backend Engineer, working within the Platform team, you’ll build and improve the foundational systems and infrastructure that power our insurance product
- You’ll architect and deliver services that are robust, secure and scalable, all while strategically partnering with team mates and stakeholders across Cuvva to understand challenges and create long term solutions
- You won’t just write good code, you’ll help shape how we work as a team
- Whether that’s supporting technical decisions, improving delivery processes or by identifying opportunities to automate and simplify
- You’ll operate methodically and collaboratively to share the future of our Platform team at Cuvva
- This role blends technical depth with a product mindset
- You’ll be as comfortable discussing performance trade-offs or service architectures as you are jumping into a feature rollout or pairing with teammates across a variety of initiatives such as building a new service in our backend platform, creating a new version of an existing API to deliver a new feature, or creating a CLI tool to automate something
- Write clean, concise, maintainable, scalable and well-tested code, being able to self review, break down, and make improvements to your own work whilst taking part in the entire product development process from problem-discovery to solution design, to implementation and rollout
- Design, build and maintain backend services, primarily in Golang, and using AWS infrastructure and tools like Terraform, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL
- Improve the scalability, reliability and observability of our systems, reducing downtime and optimising performance
- Use metrics and telemetry to make informed decisions about where and how to invest engineering effort
- Support infrastructure changes, improve deployment pipelines, and champion automation across the business
- Identify and mitigate technical risks, and get ahead of performance or scaling bottlenecks before they become blockers
- Contribute to incident response processes and technical write-ups that help us learn and improve as a team
- Take part in code reviews and technical discussions with empathy and curiosity, offering and receiving feedback with care
- Help foster a collaborative team culture, working closely with fellow Engineers, Product Managers, and other stakeholders across the business
- Take part in ceremonies, including standups, retros and planning, and keep our work visible (we use Shortcut)
- Stay curious and technical by pairing with peers regularly, learning from others to help raise the bar through knowledge sharing
Application process
- Initial chat with Engineering Manager (60m)
- Take-home task sent to you (up to 4hr)
- Technical interview & live challenge with Squad peers (90m)
- CTO chat (30m)
- Founder & CEO Chat (20m)
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Before companies like Cuvva, the most recent consumer-facing innovation in insurance was through aggregators such as Moneysupermarket. However, the experience of using these is not great. The industry is known for low levels of customer support, confusing policies and needing to create a new account every time you want a quote.
Brokers and comparison websites add another step to the process, and charge companies they work with ~£70 on each policy sold, which is passed on to the customer in the form of higher policy costs.
Cuvva's focus on customer service is unusual in insurance, but it's providing them a winning edge. They are trying to make insurance more about the experience than simply the price of the policy. It seems to be working so far, as they’ve got a lot of great customer reviews. The challenge will be scaling this support (it’s notoriously hard to scale great customer service when you’re growing fast).
For an industry where brand loyalty is currently near zero (because people go for the cheapest policies) there could be a big opportunity for a company that provides an end-to-end amazing experience and cuts out the middlemen.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-12% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Nov 2019
$19.9m
SERIES A
Jan 2017
$2m
SEED
Total funding: $23.3m
Company benefits
- Health, wfh and wellbeing budget
- Professional development budget, as well as time off for workshops, studying and courses
- One-to-one sessions with our Sanctus coaches, giving you a safe space to talk about your mental health
- Volunteer day - A chance for us to get out of the office and do some good!
- Enhanced parental leave and pay - it doesn’t matter if the Cuvva employee is the primary or secondary caregiver or adoptive parent
- Doctor Care anywhere, for online appointments, referrals & prescriptions
- 25 days of holiday a year (+ public holidays ) - this increases with each year you're at Cuvva!
- Flexible remote working (with a requirement of 3 days in the office per quarter). London area. WeWork offices in Hoxton.
- £100 a month towards your Cuvva car insurance!
- Cycle to work scheme and salary sacrifice scheme for electric car lease!
Company HQ
Farringdon, London, UK
Leadership
Freddy Macnamara
(CEO)Previously founded a renewable energy consultancy in Scotland.
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