Senior Full-Stack Engineer
1 day ago
City of London
At Open, we exist because we believe that insurance does not have to be seen as complicated or costly. We’re an AI-powered platform transforming insurance globally — making it more transparent, cost-effective, and customer friendly. Since launching in 2016, we’ve grown into a certified B Corporation, operating across ANZ and the UK, and building modern infrastructure that brings wonder into insurance. Engineering is how we earn the trust of our partners and customers, and where we turn Open’s strategy into shipped product. The UK is where our next chapter happens, and this role sits at the centre of it: you’ll be the senior engineer our UK partners deal with, turning their requirements into live integrations and keeping the platform they depend on running. You’ll work on Open Embedded, our flagship product. It lets brands offer car, home, travel, landlord and purchase-protection insurance inside their own customer journeys, so their customers can buy cover in the same place they buy the core product — configured no-code by our partners, and run end to end by us from quote through to claim. Core feature development and major platform uplifts are owned by our engineering team in Australia. Your remit is the UK end: working with partners on their requirements and integrations, configuring and extending the platform to meet them, and keeping it running in region. You’ll be hands-on in the same codebase — shipping changes yourself. The roadmap for the core product is set and built in AU and you’ll work closely with this team. Reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager, you’ll work with our partner-facing colleagues, Product, TechOps and Solution Architecture, and day to day with the engineering team in Australia. You’ll also help us build out UK engineering as we grow — starting with a mid-level full-stack engineer joining under you. This is a hands-on role. Most of your week is building and debugging: writing production code across the stack, working through integration problems with a partner’s engineers, and on incident calls for what runs in the UK. The lift is technical first, with real ownership of the team as it grows. You’ll be measured on driving up three things: • Own UK partner integrations end to end — from the first technical conversation through to a live, reliable embedded journey., • Get into partner requirements early: work out what they actually need, what our platform already does, and what genuinely needs building., • Turn that into work that ships — configuration and extension where our platform allows it, and a clear, well-argued case into the AU team where it doesn’t., • Cut the time from partner signature to live journey, quarter on quarter, using the best of modern software delivery and agentic development., • Give Product and partner-facing colleagues an early, unvarnished read on sequencing, risk and trade-offs — no surprise slips in front of a partner., • Help us hire well, then set direction for the engineers who join you and own their growth., • Work paired with agents across your own workflow — design, code, review, test, ops and integration debugging — and set the bar for how fast a small team can ship., • Use agents to take the repetitive weight out of partner support: triage, log analysis, first-line diagnosis and the reporting that goes with it., • With Product and the AU team, bring Open’s agentic capability for sales, claims and support to UK partners., • Build with the evaluations, guardrails and human-in-the-loop patterns that let us deploy GenAI safely in a regulated industry — anywhere a decision affects someone’s cover or their claim., • Hold a view on which problems an agent should own end to end versus assist on, and defend it with evidence from your own work rather than from a conference talk., • Be the UK’s technical line of defence for the platform: own availability, incident response and engineering health in region., • Join the on-call rotation. Debug production across a partner boundary you don’t control, then write the honest post-incident note., • Write code others can change without fear: tested where it counts, observable in production, and documented where the reasoning isn’t obvious., • Make sound design calls within your remit, and know which ones to elevate to the AU team or our solution architects rather than make alone., • Work hand-in-hand with TechOps, Solution Architecture and InfoSec on reliability, security and governance — including the UK and EU data-residency considerations that shape what we build and where it runs., • Feed what you learn from partners and incidents back into the AU roadmap, so the platform gets better rather than just patched around. This is a broad, hands-on senior engineering role in a lean, high-trust environment. It rewards people who are energised by ownership, breadth and agentic leverage, not those looking for a defined lane or a large organisation to sit inside. Specifically, it’s probably not the right fit if: • You want to own the core product roadmap. Feature development and major platform uplifts sit with our engineering team in Australia. Your remit is the UK end — partners, integrations, and running the platform in region., • You need greenfield to do your best work. Most of what you build extends a substantial existing platform. The craft here is in reading it well and changing it safely., • You want a fully specified ticket queue. Partner requirements arrive ambiguous and commercially loaded. Turning them into something buildable is the job, not a precursor to it., • You want to stop writing code. Most of your week is building, and we expect the role to stay that way as the team grows., • You want to stay in one layer of the stack. In a lean team you’ll be in the partner-facing journey, the services behind it, the data that proves it works, and occasionally the infrastructure it runs on., • You see AI as autocomplete. This role is for someone who has already restructured how they work around agents, not someone who plans to “start exploring” GenAI., • You want a purely advisory remit. This role owns delivery outcomes — what goes live for a partner, when, and at what quality — not just recommendations., • 5+ years building and operating production software — shipped, maintained and run by real users, not just delivered., • Full-stack range — strong on one side and genuinely competent on the other. You can build the customer journey and the service behind it., • Comfortable in someone else’s codebase — you can read a large existing system, find the right seam, and extend it safely., • Integration instinct — you’ve debugged failures across a boundary you don’t control: someone else’s API, someone else’s payload, someone else’s timeout. You reason about contracts, retries and idempotency by reflex., • Credible with a partner’s engineers — you can run a technical conversation with an external team and come out of it with a shared plan, not a longer list of questions., • Strong technical credibility in Python and modern AWS — you’ve owned services in production, including what happens when they break at 3am., • Modern frontend — TypeScript and a component framework, with real care for what the customer at the other end actually experiences., • Genuinely AI-native — you use AI agents in your own work every day, you’ve shipped something agentic to production, and you can say specifically what changed as a result., • End-to-end ownership — something you designed, built, shipped, ran on-call and then improved. You can talk credibly about all five parts., • Some experience leading engineers, formally or informally. You’ve set direction for other people’s work, given hard feedback, and helped someone level up., • Modern delivery practices — you’ve worked trunk-based with strong CI/CD and know why it matters culturally, not just technically., • Confident communicator — the design doc, the pull request description and the incident note get written without being chased, and non-technical colleagues come away knowing what to do., • Judgment about scope — you ship the small useful thing now and keep the big rewrite in your back pocket., • Bias for action — you spot issues early, fix root causes and keep pushing for simpler, faster, safer ways of working., • Exposure to the insurance, fintech, or regulated financial services sector., • Experience in a partner-facing, solutions or integration engineering role sitting alongside a core product team., • Experience building or consuming configurable or no-code product platforms (embedded insurance, white-label sales flows, partner-driven experiences)., • Having worked alongside — or led — engineers building AI or ML systems in production., • Comfort with cloud-native data warehousing (Snowflake or comparable) and the analytics or AI data layer., • Experience working in a distributed team across distant time zones, where the core engineering team is in another region., • Familiarity with AI safety practices — evaluations, red-teaming, guardrails, human-in-the-loop., • Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field — or equivalent practical experience. This role is based in London, United Kingdom. We work in a hybrid model, with three days a week in the office. We’ve found this rhythm genuinely supports collaboration and the kind of fast, high-trust culture we’ve built. You’ll have flexibility on the other two days to work in a way that suits you. You’ll work closely with colleagues in Sydney, including the engineering team that owns the core platform. In practice that means writing decisions down properly and an early call once or twice a week — not a permanently shifted working day. You’ll need the right to work in the United Kingdom. Open is on a mission to make it easy for everyone to get the most from their insurance. Insurance is one of the world’s least digitally mature industries — for years it’s remained confusing, paper-based and heavily intermediated. We launched in 2016 to build a global, AI-powered platform that digitises the entire insurance process, making it transparent, less costly and more reliable. It’s an exciting time to join Open and be part of a tech scale-up. We provide our team with: • Highly competitive compensation, including share options — we believe in paying people what they’re worth and having everyone in our company share in our success., • High levels of autonomy and trust so you can do your best work., • Growth opportunities internally — as you grow, your role can too., • Flexible working — we are about impact, not time at your desk., • We encourage freedom and responsibility, including the ability to work from anywhere., • Paid company parental leave, supporting all parents as they balance career and family., • Personal development allowance — flexible annual benefit to support learning, wellbeing and personal growth. Open is an AI-powered platform transforming insurance globally — making it more transparent, cost-effective and customer friendly. Since launching in 2016, we’ve grown into a certified B Corporation, using business as a force for good. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and are committed to providing an inclusive environment for all employees. If you need any adjustments to take part in our process fairly, at any stage, tell us and we’ll make them — you don’t need to explain why. Lastly, Open is a high-performing team that strives to achieve brilliant things every day and. We’re looking for people who are intellectually curious, courageous, innovative and passionate. Our culture is truly open: we’re continuously challenging each other to live our values — Always open, Play to win, Be a force for good, No excuses — and aren’t afraid to raise questions when we fall short. Most importantly, Open is for those that want to create change and have an impact. #J-18808-Ljbffr
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