Senior Machine Learning Engineer, UnderwriteMe
£99-120k
OTE
£90-110k
BASE
1+ day a week in office
Building software products for the life insurance market
Be an early applicant
Building software products for the life insurance market
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
£99-120k
OTE
£90-110k
BASE
1+ day a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
Using tech to ensure everyone who wants life insurance can access it.
Role
Who you are
- Experience: 6+ years in ML/AI, with deep hands-on expertise in NLP, LLMs/SLMs, and agentic systems
- LLMs & Architectures: Hands-on experience building with OpenAI and Anthropic models/APIs; strong knowledge of LLMs and agent architectures
- Tooling: Practical experience with LiteLLM, vLLM, Langfuse (or equivalent LLM observability tooling). Experience with Claude Code/Codex and associated coding-agent workflows is a plus
- Evals: Proven ability to design, build, and own evaluation harnesses for LLM/agent outputs
- Prompt & Context Engineering: Proven ability to design and optimise prompts and context, including techniques like few-shot, chain-of-thought, and prompt tuning techniques, grounded in measurable evaluation rather than guesswork. Prior experience with DSPy, GEPA, or similar is a plus
- Backend & Infra Skills: Strong Python skills, with FastAPI for service development, Postgres (or similar) for data persistence, and comfort with event-driven, async architectures. Working knowledge of ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
- Think in Outcomes: You care about whether the system actually solves the underwriter's problem, not just whether the model scores well. You're comfortable challenging the spec, proposing a different approach, and owning your feature from idea through to production impact
- Mindset: Entrepreneurial, ownership-driven, and biased to action, with a "Build Fast, Fail Fast" approach, thriving in agile, iterative environments
What the job involves
- As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll take ownership of designing, building, and deploying advanced LLM-based and agentic systems that extract and reason over medical records and application data
- You’ll experiment, iterate, and ship quickly, working alongside a cross-functional team in a dynamic, fast-fail environment
- You'll own the evals that prove your system works, and the guardrails that keep it working once real users depend on it
- Your work will have a direct impact on our product and business as we push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI
- Build & Iterate Fast: Design, experiment, and deploy production LLM and agentic systems. Quickly test hypotheses, optimise, and iterate based on real-world feedback and eval results
- Own Evals: Build and maintain the evaluation harness that tells us whether a model or prompt change made things better or worse
- Design Agentic Workflows: Architect multi-step, tool-using pipelines with explicit state, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop review where the stakes demand it
- Lead Innovation: Push the envelope with cutting-edge LLM and agentic techniques to solve hard problems in language understanding, extraction, and reasoning
- Shape the Product: Collaborate with Product, Design, and Underwriting SMEs to align ML capabilities with product goals and real domain constraints
- Scale & Optimise: Take systems from prototype to production, optimising for latency, cost per run, and reliability at scale
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 at Welcome to the Jungle
Meet the team
60 people
Indigo King, Principal Machine Learning Engineer
Our mission
Shaping the future of life insurance underwriting through AIInsights
19% employee growth in 12 months
Glassdoor (3.5)
Company
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
- 💪 Subsidised Gym Membership - The company subsidises memberships to any gym of employees' choice
- 👶🏼 Enhanced Maternity (6 months full pay) and Paternity (3 months full pay) scheme
- 💰 Bonus Scheme - based on individual and company performance
- 🏖️ 20 days a year working remotely - The opportunity to work abroad or from your home country (for those who may have moved country).
- 👩⚕️ 24/7 GP Consultation - Through the Employee Assistance Programme
- 🛍️ Cycle 2 Work Scheme
- 🏖️ 25 days holiday per year increasing by 1 day for every 2 years service, plus 1 additional flexible day off per year
- 🚗 Electric Vehicle Salary Sacrifice Scheme
Company values
- People: Our people are our greatest asset. We continuously develop ourselves and empower each other, embracing our diverse perspectives, experiences and strengths, to actively contribute to our overall success.
- Integrity: We do the right thing for our customers, people, and communities and hold each other accountable for maintaining their trust in our promises.
- Courage: We innovate and make UnderwriteMe stronger by seeking diverse perspectives, testing different ways of operating and engaging in constructive debate.
- Partnership: Relationships are at the center of our business, and we work together as one team to meet the needs of our key stakeholders.
- Enduring Strength: We take pride in being here for the long-term. Our financial strength, resilience and risk mindset enables our customers to worry less and live more.
Company HQ
St Katharine's & Wapping, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Andrew Doran
(CEO)Prevously Global Chief Underwriter at Pacif Life Re and was an Underwriting Strategy Manager for Aviva.
Diversity, Equity & 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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