Senior Software Engineer, Ladder
Infrastructure
$145-192k
+ Stock options
More information about location
Flexible life insurance provider
Be an early applicant
Flexible life insurance provider
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$145-192k
+ Stock options
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To combine the power of innovative technology with world-class financial and insurance expertise to make it easy for anyone to access life insurance.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate brings demonstrated experience in software engineering, leadership maturity and a deep understanding of engineering infrastructure
- A functional programming expert: You have deep production experience with Clojure or another functional language and are excited to work in a Clojure-and-JVM environment. Prior Clojure experience is a strong plus
- An expert with CI/CD and Build pipelines: You have battle-tested experience profiling and optimizing CI/CD pipelines for large codebases, possess intricate knowledge of monorepo build tools like Bazel and Buck, and know how to solve issues related to build and test slowness
- An Infrastructure enthusiast: You have extensive experience with cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Datomic, BigQuery and cloud platforms like GCP
- A Systems Thinker: You possess a deep understanding of software design and architecture. You don't just patch bugs; you design elegant systems that prevent entire classes of problems
- A Self Starter: You thrive in ambiguity. You can take a high-level, messy business problem, define the technical constraints, and drive the solution from ideation to deployment
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in infrastructure/platform roles
- BS, MS in Computer Science or related technical field a strong plus
- Must-have: Kubernetes, GCP (or equivalent cloud), CI/CD pipeline design, Docker, infrastructure-as-code, JVM operational experience, BigQuery, Kafka
- Strong plus: Clojure, Datomic, Datadog or similar observability platform, monorepo build tools (Buck, Bazel)
- Nice-to-have: Go, Python, Beam/Dataflow,
- Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply for roles if they don't meet all the criteria – unlike majority candidates meeting significantly fewer requirements. We strongly encourage you to apply if you’re interested: we'd love to know how you can elevate our team with your unique experience!
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to accelerate developer productivity across Ladder's engineering organization
- You'll own and modernize our CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and developer tooling - while also contributing to the reliability of our cloud infrastructure and data platform
- As a senior engineer on the team, you won't just be writing code, you'll be shaping our platform strategy
- Improve developer velocity across the engineering organization
- You'll measure and optimize the inner loop - how long it takes an engineer to go from code change to confident production deployment
- This includes build times, test parallelization, deployment rollout speed, and the tooling engineers interact with every day
- Shape the architecture of Ladder's production infrastructure
- You'll evaluate trade-offs and make high-impact technical decisions — like whether to replace custom monitoring tooling with native cloud provider integrations, or redesign how we rebuild data pipelines when upstream logic changes
- You'll be the person who sees the big picture across systems and decides where to invest engineering effort
- Participate in incident response for infrastructure, run retrospectives, and help drive follow-through on fixes as part of the team
- Systematically pay down infrastructure tech debt. You'll partner with your team to identify legacy systems that have been superseded by better alternatives and build a roadmap to retire them — migrating from bespoke systems to native integrations, cleaning up remnants of past cloud migrations, and upgrading components that have drifted behind
- You'll raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance - not through formal management, but through the quality and clarity of your technical work
Our take
Ladder is a life insurance company whose primary aim is to simplify the process of acquiring life insurance. In the past, getting coverage for life insurance has been a lengthy and time-consuming affair, but with Ladder, applicants can answer a few questions and sign up on their phones.
Jamie, the CEO and Co-Founder, felt the life-changing impact of life insurance on his own family when he lost his father at a young age before struggling to get life insurance policies for himself as an adult.
The market for life insurance in the US alone is worth over $128 billion, and Ladder faces stiff competition from Haven Life, a subsidiary of insurance giant MassMutual. Ladder will face stiff competition when traditional insurers undergo the digital transformation needed to join Ladder in offering five-minute life insurance policies via smartphone.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Oct 2021
$100m
SERIES D
Feb 2020
$37.5m
SERIES C
Total funding: $196.1m
Company benefits
- Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage | We offer competitive healthcare,dental and vision plans for you and your family
- Flexible paid time off | Take the time that you need to rest and recharge, including our week-long winter holiday closure
- Stock options | We offer competitive stock option packages to participate in the success of building Ladder, including an extended option exercise window of 7 years after two years with Ladder
- A rewarding 401k match program | We'll match up to 4% of your contributions as you save for your retirement goals
- Ladder Fit Program | Your health matters. That’s why Ladder provides reimbursement of up to $50 a month for wellness-related expenses
- Commuter benefits | When you work from the office, you will receive pre-tax
- Benefits for your commute and free parking
- A stocked, beautiful new office | Located in downtown Palo Alto, our office was specifically designed to accommodate all working styles. We've invested in technology to support our hybrid team, plus we provide office snacks and daily catered lunches so that team members can work well and have fun together
- Paid parental leave | We think it's crucial that new parents have time to adjust to their new lives without worrying about work, so we provide all parents inclusive of birthing, adoption, or fostering ten weeks of paid baby bonding
- Work-from-home flexibility and support | We recognize that everyone's homelife is different and support remote and hybrid work. Upon joining, we provide a one-time $500 remote office stipend for all team members and then a monthly $150 stipend to cover WFH costs such as the internet
- Fun company-wide events | Whether we work locally or remotely, we genuinely enjoy spending time together. That’s why we plan fun virtual and in-person events to let loose and laugh
Company HQ
Downtown North, Palo Alto, CA
Leadership
Jamie Hale
(CEO & Co-Founder)Founding Partner at Aldenwood Capital and former Partner at Oak Hill Investment Management. MBA from Harvard Business School.
Laura Hale
(CPO & Co-Founder)Former Financial Consultant. Previously an Associate at Robert M. Bass and The Carlyle Group.
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