Engineering Manager

About the Role

The insurance industry is ripe for disruption. Instead of using the few major software houses in the industry, we’ve opted to build our system from scratch using a modern tech stack with a best-in-class continuous delivery pipeline.

To support and help shape growth we need to invest in our hands-on engineering manager layer. This role is critical to the business, instilling our technical values and culture across a growing tech team.

The role will be accountable for the performance of 4-5 engineers that sit between different squads in the business. Success in the role will mean leading your engineers in:

1. Delivering on ambitious and stretching OKRs
2. Creating an environment and developing processes that promote both autonomy and accountability
3. Making pragmatic and sometimes difficult technical decisions based on their trade offs

Beyond the performance of their direct team, a standout candidate will be expected to contribute across the whole tech team in both the day to day, tooling and architectural principles. This will require working closely and collaboratively with peers and across the whole business, particularly with our domain experts in the underwriting team.

We’re a pragmatic team; we follow TDD when it makes sense but also often spike out features and then write tests. We use these tests to ensure we don’t break anything once we have a clearer picture and refactor. Our continuous delivery pipeline is fully automated and we release code to production multiple times a day.

Each engineer is given the responsibility to design, write, deploy and maintain their solutions. You’ll be responsible for empowering them to deliver.

Our system is built with a few micro (macro) services that are usually a combination of the following tech:

• Laravel and Friends - Vue, Tailwind and Spatie
• Node (TypeScript)
• Event Sourcing
• CI / CD / Hosting with Heroku and Netlify

We believe a strong relationship between Engineering, Product and Domain means building a better product for the customer, developing that within and outside your sphere of influence is crucial to our continued success.

About you

This is a fantastic opportunity to bring your talents and empathetic first approach to a small but ambitious team as we build an industry leading product. To succeed, you’ll need solid experience in Laravel, DDD and running scalable solutions in production.

As a fast-growing company, you will also need to help us improve our business processes and articulate trade offs with each technical decision. You’ll need the skills to influence and shape those changes.

Insurance is complex and fascinating. You should want to soak it up and, ideally, derive real enjoyment from mastering an intellectually stimulating industry - whilst working to change it for the better!

Every day is different! These are some of the things you might be doing:

• You will manage a highly performing team of software engineers
• You will focus on inspiring, mentoring and building strong relationships with your direct reports on a personal level and help them develop their careers
• Drive your team’s technical direction, growth and how they work
• Have the autonomy to do what you think is right (and change what isn’t working)
• Help remove blockers for your team
• Be involved in hiring and Superscript’s continued growth
• Pairing and doing Google style PR reviews
• Planning architecture and problem solving on whiteboards with your team
• Creating or contributing to open source projects to give back
• Going to developer meet-ups regularly

Requirements

We don’t like to put people into boxes, but it’s safe to say:

• You have experience as an engineering manager, working with a product engineering team
• You love developing people and have experience growing engineering teams
• You enjoy the challenge of balancing technical idealism with delivery and pragmatism
• You’re passionate about the discovery phase of new features
• You have a strong technical background and can confidently have difficult technical discussions with your team
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, whether to the engineering team, to business stakeholders or to our leadership team
• An appreciation for Event Sourcing and how it can be used an effective tool

In return, we offer you: 

• A competitive salary and the ability to grow your career at the UK’s leading Insurtech
• An amazing team and founders, supportive board and investors
• 25 days holiday - so there’s plenty of time for work, rest and play
• Vitality private health and dental insurance
• Great pension (up to 10% on top of your salary)
• Cycle to work scheme
• Latest Apple tech gear
• Fun, modern and informal office environment with regular team social events
• Central London location with the best lunch in town (Borough market!)
• Hybrid way of working for the perfect work / life balance