Engineering Manager - Underwriting & Pricing

Homeprotect Home Insurance; Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare

Annual bonus up to 30%

Pension with Aegon

Staff discount on Homeprotect

Flexible working

25 days annual leave

Job summary

Homeprotect is seeking a product-minded Engineering Manager to lead the Underwriting & Pricing engineering capability. You will build and grow a high-performing team, partner with Product, Actuarial and Commercial stakeholders, and evolve pricing and underwriting platforms for speed, reliability and scale.

You'll shape the technical roadmap, ensure safe delivery of pricing changes, and drive continuous improvement in engineering metrics while maintaining customer trust.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading an engineering team with accountability for people, delivery, technical health and operational excellence.
• Strong technical background with architecture and distributed backend systems.
• Hands-on understanding of CI/CD, DevOps and automated testing.
• Experience operating production systems with high availability, performance and resilience.
• Experience defining technical strategy balancing delivery with long-term platform investment.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Underwriting & Pricing platform engineering team and roadmap.
• Own delivery, reliability and platform health across pricing systems.
• Collaborate with Product, Actuarial, Commercial and Policy admins teams.
• Drive testing automation, deployment discipline and incident response.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term platform sustainability.
• Promote modern software engineering practices (CI/CD, IaC, observability).

Tools

Kubernetes

Azure

Cloud-native development

Job description

Cover for Almost every Home

We founded Homeprotect on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. Since 2002, we've been combining smart technology with real human expertise to protect hundreds of thousands of unique homes across the UK, and we're just getting started.

About Homeprotect

Cover for Almost every Home

We founded Homeprotect on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. Since 2002, we've been combining smart technology with real human expertise to protect hundreds of thousands of unique homes across the UK, and we're just getting started. If you're someone who loves solving interesting problems, taking ownership and working with a team that aims high, speaks up and lifts each other, Homeprotect is a place where you can do meaningful work, grow your career and make a real difference for our customers.

What It's Like To Work Here

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our people. We're a small but perfectly formed team of insurance specialists, technologists, data scientists and customer champions - all bringing individual expertise, an appetite for innovation and a shared ambition to protect the homes and things people love. We work at pace, but we trust our people to work in a way that brings out their best. You'll collaborate closely across teams, have real ownership from day one and see the impact you have first‑hand with flexible working to help you balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life. We've been recognised as a Great Place to Work UK for seven consecutive years - most recently ranked 29th nationally, jumping 71 places in a single year.

ROLE PURPOSE

Underwriting & Pricing is responsible for one of Homeprotect's most strategically important capabilities: deciding which risks we accept, what we charge for them, and how quickly we can adapt to changing market conditions. The team owns the pricing and rating engines, underwriting rules, risk appetite logic and quote calculation services that sit at the heart of every customer journey. Every quote generated by Homeprotect depends on the reliability, performance and flexibility of these systems. We're looking for a product‑minded Engineering Manager to lead this engineering capability. You'll build and grow a high‑performing engineering team, partner closely with Product, Actuarial and Commercial stakeholders, and ensure our underwriting and pricing platforms evolve safely while enabling faster business change. Rather than delivering projects from a shared backlog, you'll lead a long‑lived product engineering team responsible for the reliability, evolution and technical health of this domain. You'll create the environment where engineers can do their best work while balancing short‑term delivery with long‑term platform sustainability. Success in this role means enabling the business to introduce pricing and underwriting changes with confidence, improving engineering effectiveness, and continuously strengthening one of Homeprotect's core competitive capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & People Development

• Build, lead and grow a healthy, high‑performing engineering team through effective hiring, coaching, mentoring and performance management.
• Create a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration and continuous learning.
• Develop engineers through regular feedback, career development and technical coaching.
• Foster psychological safety while maintaining high standards of engineering excellence.
• Build an engineering culture aligned with Homeprotect's Engineering Excellence Framework, encouraging technical quality, product thinking, delivery excellence and continuous improvement.
• Align team priorities with business outcomes and create clarity around goals, expectations and success measures.

Engineering Ownership

• Own the engineering strategy, delivery and operational health of the Underwriting & Pricing platform, including pricing engines, underwriting rules, risk appetite logic and quote generation services.
• Define and evolve the team's technical roadmap, balancing business priorities with long‑term platform sustainability and scalability.
• Deliver business outcomes predictably while maintaining high standards of quality, resilience and operational excellence.
• Ensure pricing and underwriting changes are delivered safely through robust testing, automation and engineering discipline.
• Modernise and progressively simplify legacy pricing and underwriting platforms while maintaining operational stability and customer trust.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering metrics including deployment frequency, lead time, reliability, change failure rate and operational excellence.
• Lead incident response and post‑incident learning for systems owned by the team.
• Champion engineering automation and AI‑assisted development where appropriate to improve engineering productivity and reduce operational overhead.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that enable future growth without unnecessary complexity.

Product & Stakeholder Partnership

• Partner closely with the Product Manager to define priorities, roadmap and measurable outcomes for the Underwriting & Pricing capability.
• Work alongside Actuarial teams to translate pricing models, underwriting rules and risk appetite into robust engineering solutions.
• Collaborate with Commercial teams to enable pricing optimisation, experimentation and controlled product changes.
• Work closely with the Policy Administration Platform Team to ensure reliable end‑to‑end policy creation and lifecycle management.
• Partner with Customer Experience teams to ensure quote journeys deliver both an excellent customer experience and accurate pricing decisions.
• Build trusted relationships across Technology and the wider business, helping stakeholders understand engineering trade‑offs and shaping pragmatic solutions.
• Contribute to organisation‑wide engineering standards, platform improvements and architectural direction beyond your own domain.

Engineering Excellence & Continuous Improvement

• Create an environment where engineers consistently deliver high‑quality software, continuously improve their craft and take ownership of business outcomes.
• Encourage experimentation, learning and pragmatic decision‑making while maintaining the operational discipline expected of a critical business capability.
• Continuously improve engineering practices, delivery processes and operational maturity.
• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce technical debt and improve the maintainability of the pricing platform.
• Help shape Homeprotect's engineering standards, tooling, observability and platform capabilities as the organisation continues its product engineering transformation.
• Promote modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, observability and secure software development.

Essential

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• Proven experience leading an engineering team with accountability for people, delivery, technical health and operational excellence.
• Strong technical background with the ability to engage deeply on architecture, software design and distributed backend systems.
• Hands‑on understanding of modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing and cloud‑native development.
• Experience operating production systems requiring high availability, performance and resilience.
• Experience defining technical strategy while balancing immediate delivery with long‑term platform investment.
• Experience leading long‑lived product engineering teams with ownership of a business capability rather than delivering project‑based work.
• Experience partnering closely with Product Managers to balance customer value, engineering investment and delivery priorities.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively with non‑engineering stakeholders such as Product, Commercial, Pricing, Risk or Actuarial teams.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, engineering trade‑offs and technical decision making.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence stakeholders across both business and technology.

Desirable

• Experience within General Insurance or another highly regulated industry.
• Understanding of pricing, underwriting, actuarial or risk modelling concepts.
• Experience leading organisations through the transition from project‑based delivery to domain‑oriented product teams.
• Experience modernising legacy platforms while maintaining operational stability.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Azure and cloud‑native engineering practices.
• Experience using AI‑assisted engineering tools to improve software delivery and engineering productivity.

Benefits

We want you to feel rewarded, supported and set up to thrive throughout your career with us.
Learning and Growth: We invest in your development through structured learning, mentoring, buddying, on‑the‑job experience and cross‑functional projects. We support role‑relevant professional qualifications where they'll make the biggest difference, and our Lunch and Learn sessions to help you stay connected to what’s going on right across the business.
Health and Wellbeing: Your wellbeing matters here. We offer private healthcare through BUPA, an Employee Assistance Programme covering legal, financial and counselling support for you, a Wellbeing Centre with online tools and resources, regular wellbeing seminars and workshops, annual flu jabs and an annual eye care voucher.
Financial Security and Reward: We offer an annual discretionary bonus scheme upto 30% of your base pay, life insurance at four times your salary, and a pension with Aegon. You'll also receive a significant discount on Homeprotect home insurance - with a friends and family discount too, and a staff referral bonus when someone you recommend joins the team.
Time Off: 25 days’ annual leave plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to five additional days each year.
Genuine Flexible Working We trust our people to work in a way that best suits them - with flexible working to balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life. We ask that everyone comes into the office at least once a week, as we believe in‑person connection is important for collaboration, culture and building great relationships. You'll receive a homeworking starter kit from day one and can claim towards additional home office equipment within your first six months.
Purpose and Community: We care about more than just the work. Through our charity partnership with Refuge, the UK's largest specialist domestic abuse charity and regular social, wellbeing and charitable events throughout the year, there are plenty of ways to connect, give back and feel part of something bigger.

UNIQUE AS STANDARD

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. We believe in celebrating difference - everything that makes both our customers and our people unique. We consider visa sponsorship on a case by case basis for the right candidate, so please don't let that stop you from applying.

Your data will be maintained in line with our recruitment data privacy policy.

Regulatory Responsibilities

As an FCA regulated insurer, doing the right thing isn't a compliance requirement - it's simply how we work. All colleagues are expected to uphold the FCA Individual Conduct Rules (1–6) and act with integrity, due skill and care, openness with regulators and a genuine commitment to delivering good outcomes for our customers. You'll work within approved processes and authority limits, keep accurate and auditable records, protect data under UK GDPR and our information security policies, update risks and exceptions promptly, report incidents, breaches and any financial crime or sanctions concerns (including via whistleblowing), support vulnerable customers with reasonable adjustments, and complete all mandatory training to maintain competence. If the role falls within SM&CR, a supplementary document outlining the key regulatory responsibilities will be provided. We founded Homeprotect on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. Since 2002, we've been combining smart technology with real human expertise to protect hundreds of thousands of unique homes across the UK, and we're just getting started. If you're someone who loves solving interesting problems, taking ownership and working with a team that aims high, speaks up and lifts each other. Homeprotect is a place where you can do meaningful work, grow your career and make a real difference for our customers.