Director of Engineering, UnderwriteMe
Decision Platform
2+ days 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
2+ days 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
- You are technically great, with a strong understanding of engineering and engineering leadership
- You can sit with engineers and debate technical concepts but are also capable of describing these concepts to non engineers clearly
- You thrive on moving between different levels of detail depending on what the situation needs
- You understand engineering leadership best practices with regards to creating autonomous cross functional teams and how to measure their success
- You are a visionary who drives the team, providing clarity and guidance to enable us to move at speed
- You care as much about the product we create and the value that creates for our customers as you do engineering excellence
- You care more about solving the problem than simply talking about it
- You look for creative solutions to problems, understanding when to focus on dealing with the root causes and when a quick fix will suffice
- Your coaching extends across all your relationships and you’re comfortable coaching people both within and outside of engineering
- You are an entrepreneurial, strategic thinker
- This role sits on the leadership team for the product and needs to be comfortable creating and challenging business and product strategy as well as leading in the creation of engineering strategy
- You care about creating business value with technology and not just using the latest technology or job title to put on your CV
- You actively seek out and give feedback and do this in a way that builds strong relationships with your team and peers
- You think about working iteratively, using experiments and data to drive how you make decisions
- You thrive in a fast paced environment with large amounts of uncertainty
- You are comfortable working to transform an organisation, accepting this means that everything is not working perfectly today
- You are an experienced engineering leader, acting as manager of managers across multiple cross functional product teams
- You have a strong grounding in core computer science principles and software engineering practices
- You’ve been working in teams following modern software delivery methodologies, such as agile, lean, and DevOps
- You know how to create and change org structures to improve the value driven by your teams
- You’ve worked in cross functional teams, developing and executing technical and product strategy
- You’ve built modern cloud-native systems
- You’ve built SaaS products and understand the patterns used to build them
- You’ve worked with enterprise / B2B software and understand the challenges, extra bonus if you’ve implemented ISO 27001 / SOC2 practices in engineering
What the job involves
- You will lead engineering for the four cross functional squads within the decision platform, directly managing the Tech Leads for each squad along with the Delivery Manager
- You will represent engineering in the product triad, working in partnership with Product Managers and Design to build out the strategy and roadmap for Decision Platform
- You will be a member of the Decision Platform cross-functional leadership team along with counterparts from Product, Product Marketing, Sales and Customer Success
- This team is responsible for leading the product, making decisions from our overall strategy (in line with the UnderwriteMe corporate strategy) as well as deciding where to make investments in the product
- You will also be a member of the Engineering leadership at UnderwriteMe, collaborating with other engineering leaders, working on improving our overall engineering function
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
Insights
19% employee growth in 12 months
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
- Impact Oriented: Driven by meaningful results, prioritising actions that deliver significant outcomes and contribute to team success. Motivated by value creation and business impact, not titles or status.
- Entrepreneurial: Demonstrate initiative and a proactive approach to identifying and seizing the right opportunities. Show resilience in the face of challenges and maintains a bias for action.
- Curiosity: Exhibit a strong desire to learn and understand new concepts. Approach problems with creativity and persistence, consistently seeking effective solutions.
- Technically Great: Possess a deep understanding of relevant technical skills and knowledge applicable to job role . Apply technical expertise effectively to solve complex issues.
- Strategic Thinkers: Demonstrate an understanding of the broader impact of their role and decisions. Effectively balances immediate actions with strategic planning to ensure alignment with medium-term and long-term organisational objectives.
- Adaptability: Open to feedback and willing to learn from others. Show a growth mindset and the ability to adapt and improve.
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, 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
Share this job
View 6 more jobs at UnderwriteMe