Pricing Automation Engineer

Hastings Direct; East Midlands; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading digital insurance provider is seeking a Pricing Automation Engineer to enhance their automated trading platform, Skywalker. The role requires strong programming skills, particularly in Python and SQL. Successful candidates will thrive in a dynamic, collaborative environment focused on innovation and meaningful work. This position allows for flexible hybrid working arrangements and offers numerous benefits, including competitive bonuses, mental wellbeing support, and extensive leave options. Join a company dedicated to driving growth through technology and team development.

Benefits

Flexible working

Competitive bonus scheme

Financial wellbeing support

Mental wellbeing programme

25 days annual leave

Qualifications

• You’ll need Python for scripting, automation, or light data wrangling.
• Confident with SQL queries and joins.
• Experience with Git & GitHub, including branching and pull requests.

Responsibilities

• Prototype new enhancements to the Skywalker toolkit.
• Contribute to adoption and rollout of Skywalker tools.
• Automate key underwriting data pipelines.

Skills

Python

SQL

Git & GitHub

Commercial awareness

Tools

Pandas

Scikit-learn

Azure

Job description

Job Title: Pricing Automation Engineer

Location: London / Leicester / Bexhill

Regrettably we are unable to offer sponsorship for this role

Welcome to Hastings Direct

We're a digital insurance provider with a clear strategy to become the best and biggest player in the UK market. As a company, we've made huge investments in our technology, pricing, data and analytics capabilities over the past few years, along with nurturing our 4Cs culture and substantial investment in our people. And as a Finance team, we're doing exactly the same - building a market leading finance technology platform, investing in our team and our approach to leadership development, with a real focus on commercially adding value to the business.

The fact you're now reading this job advert means we've tempted you to find out more about #lifeatHD. If you like what you see, we hope you'll consider joining our team.

We have high standards and understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they feel they tick every box. If you're excited about joining us and think you have some of what we are looking for, even if you're not 100% sure, we would love to hear from you.

Role Overview

Our mission is to create the leading suite of exploratory and data products in the industry - empowering our pricing, data and analytics (PDA) community to move faster and deliver more, with major commercial impact.

Skywalker is our automated trading platform and is at the heart of what we do. It maximises underwriting pricing efficiency and hosts a growing suite of tooling that's being adopted across the wider business. We're expanding Skywalker's capabilities and looking for curious, motivated people to help support the PDA community in getting the most out of it.

This role is open to junior and mid-level applicants, including graduates, provided you meet the technical requirements and bring a learning mindset.

Why this might excite you

Our team works at the cutting edge of technology and automation, and we aspire to drive business success through innovation and smart technology. We believe great work happens when you're supported, trusted, and doing something meaningful. That's why this role offers:

• Learning: Whether you're early in your career or branching out, we support your future - through mentoring, pair programming, and on-the-job learning through a well-connected community that values delivery, growth and enjoyment.
• Autonomy: You'll have the freedom to solve real business problems in your own way
• Purpose: You'll help streamline and scale pricing and underwriting across the business and be a key contributor, collaborating at the intersection of pricing, modelling, engineering & more
• Specialty: You'll build niche expertise in pricing automation, underwriting workflows and trading infrastructure
• Clear expectations:
  • Prototype new enhancements to our Skywalker toolkit
  • Contribute to adoption and rollout of Skywalker tools across new teams
  • Automate key underwriting data pipelines

Essential skills/experience:

Technical skills

You’ll need:

• Python (whether scripting, automation, or light data wrangling)
• SQL (confident with queries and joins)
• Git & GitHub (e.g. branching, pull requests, code reviews)
• Some commercial awareness - maybe you've worked with pricing, market dynamics, underwriting, or just have a good instinct for business impact

Personal

You’re likely to thrive if you are:

• Accountable: Confident owning and solving problems, and challenge the status quo
• Brilliant communicator: able to engage and trade information clearly in any setting
• Collaborative: you enjoy working with others, helping them get the most out of Skywalker
• Responsive: you can context switch comfortably across multiple workstreams
• A lifelong learner: you seek out growth both with and without direction
• Curious: you enjoy exploring how things work and how they can be improved
• Creative: you're comfortable prototyping or hacking to learn quickly
• Optimistic: you believe change is possible and worth pursuing
• Highly analytical: with capability to interpret complex data sets to identify patterns, trends and actionable insights.

Bonus round

Don't worry if you don't tick all these boxes, especially if you're curious and eager to learn. We'll help you build these skills.

Experience with:

• Automation of processes/pipelines for data, analytics or operations
• ML-specific Python libraries (e.g. pandas, scikit-learn, xgboost)
• Big data tooling (e.g. Snowflake/snowpark, pyspark)
• Cloud computing - especially Azure, where we deploy key parts of our platform

The interview process

Our interview process involves the below:

• Recruiter screening call
• Take home assessment
• Interview with hiring team

As a Disability Confident employer, we're committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are fully inclusive - what this means to you is if you're applying for a job with us, you'll have fair access to support and adjustments throughout your recruitment journey. We also welcome applications through the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS). For more information on the DCS, please visit our inclusive business page on our careers website.

Benefits:

Flexible working

We champion a flexible hybrid working approach - please speak to your recruiter to discuss in more detail.

Competitive bonus scheme

All colleagues are eligible for our annual 4Cs performance bonus.

Financial wellbeing

As well as providing you with 4x your salary with our life assurance cover, income protection at no extra cost, and matched pension contributions up to 10%, we are proud to provide you with an award winning package which includes discounts, cashback, free independent mortgage advice and free access to financial wellbeing support.

Mental wellbeing programme

We have the Thrive mental health app, our colleague assistance programme available 24/7, our own in-house mental health first aiders, support groups and a dedicated team to make sure we are covering your needs.

There's more!

25 days annual leave + bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell one of your weeks, access to our health care cash back plans, dental plans, discounted health assessments, Cycle to Work and tech schemes, discounted and free onsite facilities, social events throughout the year and much more.

Join us and you'll find a different way of doing things. We call it the 4Cs. We focus on getting it right for our colleagues, customers, company and community. As one of our colleagues, you'll be helping to drive our growth, so in return, we'll give you all the support, training and development you need. Our 4Cs principles are simple: we believe by creating the right culture for our colleagues and giving them the right tools to do their job, we'll deliver good outcomes for every customer, helping us to grow the company profitably and sustainably and allowing us to invest in the communities we serve.

Hastings Group is an equal opportunities employer which means we treat people fairly. We welcome applications from all suitably skilled persons regardless of their gender, age, race, disability, ethnic background, religion/belief, sexual orientation, gender reassignment or marital/family status. Please also note that we have a thorough referencing process, which includes credit and criminal record checks.