Senior Platform Engineer

UnderwriteMe Ltd; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading Insurtech firm in London is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to enhance their cloud platform. In this role, you'll lead complex initiatives, mentor engineers, and ensure high availability across regions. Ideal candidates will have expertise in Kubernetes and AWS, with a passion for developer experience. Competitive benefits include a generous leave policy, healthcare coverage, and wellness programs.

Benefits

25 days annual leave with buy/sell option

Comprehensive private health insurance

Subsidized gym membership

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing and operating AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Deep knowledge of helm and Terraform best practices.
• Proven ability to lead initiatives from discovery through delivery.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex platform initiatives from concept through to production.
• Maintain and operate a global, high availability infrastructure platform.
• Champion engineering best practices including CI/CD and SRE.

Skills

Kubernetes

AWS infrastructure

Observability

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

Job Title

Senior Platform Engineer

Job Description

We\'re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help us maintain, optimise and grow our cloud platform by driving and delivering initiatives covering low-level cloud architecture, developer experience and tooling, SRE and cloud security.

This is a high-impact, hands-on technical role where you\'ll work within a team of talented platform & cloud engineers to improve scalability, reliability, developer experience and time-to-market for our product teams. You\'ll combine your experience operating large systems in the cloud with a passion for developer experience and streamlining the road to production.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex platform initiatives from concept through to production, driving alignment, unblocking dependencies, and ensuring timely delivery of solid, reliable platform components that form the foundation of our products.
• Maintain and operate a global, high availability infrastructure platform spread across 5 regions with round-the-clock usage, supporting our customer success and product development teams to deliver value to our customers. You will also participate in out-of-hours on-call rotas.
• Champion engineering best practices, including CI/CD, SRE, networking and cloud security - raising the overall bar for quality and reliability.
• Collaborate and consult with other engineering teams to help guide and influence their cloud architecture and usage of the platform, ensuring their road to production is smooth and pain-free.
• Mentor and develop engineers, growing their design and architectural thinking, technical capabilities, and ability to operate at scale.
• Research, evaluate, and drive adoption of new tools, frameworks, or architectural patterns that improve developer experience, platform resilience, and delivery velocity.

What Type of Person Fits the Role

You're a high-impact platform engineer who thrives on solving complex infrastructure and tooling problems in the cloud. You care deeply about creating scalable, maintainable, and efficient platform solutions that provide a solid and delightful foundation for other teams to build upon.

You have a deep experience of operating Kubernetes workloads at scale and maintaining a secure, well-governed network stack around them. You are a strong advocate for clear, maintainable and well-tested IaC configurations that make changes safe and easy.

You're collaborative and approachable; as much at home sharing your knowledge and experience with team-mates or advising platform users as you are being knee-deep in a gnarly helm chart squashing bugs.

You have your finger on the pulse; both in terms of industry best-practices and technologies and also in how our users interact with our platform - identifying pain-points and needs that can be solved to improve the developer experience.

You appreciate the value of a paved road in providing a reliable platform, but also know when rigidity needs to be avoided for the benefit of the user.

You strive to automate all the things, reducing manual toil and opportunity for human error.

You look forward to collaborating with your team in-person 2 days a week in our London office.

Technical Requirements

• Extensive experience designing, building & operating distributed AWS cloud infrastructure, including (but not limited to) networking, IAM, observability & monitoring, security & governance, and maintaining kubernetes clusters.
• Deep knowledge of helm and terraform best practices.
• Proven ability to lead initiatives - from discovery through delivery, solving problems and finding the best solutions that balance efficiency and ease of use.
• Hands-on expertise in observability, monitoring, and SRE, with experience monitoring and improving the reliability and efficiency of cloud solutions. Datadog experience a bonus.
• Experience modernising legacy systems and simplifying architecture, reducing cognitive load and making systems easier to reason about, maintain, and evolve over time.

About UnderwriteMe

UnderwriteMe is an Insurtech software business and subsidiary of Pacific Life Re (PL Re), a global life and pensions reinsurance firm. We have a vision to help everyone purchase protection insurance by using data and disruptive technology to transform our partners and markets in order to make their underwriting processes as quick and efficient as possible.

Our core products are:

• Decision Platform - a B2B enterprise platform that provides a best-in-market Underwriting Rules Engine used by over 30 insurers to power their underwriting decisions. The product is sold across UK & Ireland, Asia-Pacific and North America. The platform combines our engine with technology to source and process third-party information supporting underwriting decisions for insurers. We are already working on capabilities, powered by AI, to make these decisions even more efficient.
• Protection Platform - a B2B2C marketplace used by over 15,000 advisors to power quoting and purchase of protection products in the UK. We currently deliver 16% of the UK markets protection policies and we are already working to increase our reach.

Working for UnderwriteMe

Joining UnderwriteMe means being part of a technology company that is committed to bringing a fresh and dynamic approach to insurance. You\'d be working with a team of highly technical experts made up of people with backgrounds in software, fintech, and insurance.

Every person in our global team is valued for the unique qualities they bring to our business and we seek to build their expertise and support their individual ambitions at every step. Of course, we take our work seriously and we know our team can operate under great pressure. We work hard and thrive on achievement, but we also know how to have fun and relax too. We regularly host a range of team building days to strengthen our team\'s connection with each other and reflect on their successes.

Providing employees with a healthy work-life balance is very important to our culture. We have a wide range of employee benefits and we host regular social activities and wellbeing initiatives. We are also committed to supporting our employee\'s involvement in their communities, by actively fundraising, hosting charity events, and overseeing volunteering opportunities.

Benefits

(Only for Permanent and Fixed Term Employees)

• Leave
  • 25 days of annual leave with option to buy/sell more days
  • Adoption and fertility leave
  • Generous enhanced parental leave
• Healthcare
  • Comprehensive private insurance coverage for employee and dependents
  • Group Life Insurance coverage of 9x basic annual salary and Group Income Protection up to 75% of basic annual salary
  • Optical benefits
• Savings & Retirement
  • 15% combined employee/employer contributions
• Wellness
  • Subsidized gym membership
  • Access to Employee Assistance Program
  • Cycle to Work and Electric Car Salary Sacrifice Scheme
  • Time off for volunteering
  • Charitable matching of employee donations

As part of our commitment to accessibility for all, UnderwriteMe will, upon the request of the applicant, provide accommodation during the recruitment process to ensure equal access to applicants with disabilities. Please contact us about your needs, and we will consult with you to ensure suitable accommodation is provided.

UnderwriteMe Values

Please click here to view our company values