Staff Engineer - Underwriting & Pricing

Homeprotect Home Insurance; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 125,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Learning and Growth

Health and Wellbeing

Financial Security and Reward

Time Off

Genuine Flexible Working

Job summary

Homeprotect seeks a Staff Engineer to shape the technical direction of the Underwriting & Pricing domain as the platform modernises. You will work across teams to enable rapid, safe changes in pricing and underwriting logic, with autonomy to define architecture and standards beyond a single team.

You will collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership, mentor engineers, and raise our engineering practice to support scale, auditability, and reliability in a regulated insurance context.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction and architecture for Underwriting & Pricing.
• Lead cross-team architectural decisions and document them clearly.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks in pricing and underwriting domains.
• Design complex cross-team initiatives from concept to delivery.
• Be the technical point of contact for dependent teams and influence standards.

Skills

Staff Engineer ownership

Architecture & standards

Cross-team influence

Rules-heavy systems

Backend language (C#/Java)

CI/CD, testing, observability

Cloud platforms (Azure/GCP)

Excellent communication

Tools

Azure

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.

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.

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 decides which risks Homeprotect takes on and what we charge for them, one of the company's most strategically important and technically demanding domains, and one whose output, the price and terms of a quote, ripples through nearly every other part of the business: the journey that presents it to a customer, the policy created from it, and the numbers reported on afterwards.

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to shape the technical direction of this domain as its platform modernises, and to work across the boundary with the teams that depend on it, so pricing and underwriting changes can be made quickly, safely and with confidence across the business, not just within one team's codebase. At this level, you'll operate with a high degree of autonomy, defining technical direction rather than executing someone else's, and your influence will extend beyond a single team: you'll be the person other engineering teams turn to when a change touches pricing, quoting or underwriting logic.

Success in this role means Underwriting & Pricing's architecture and technical standards let the business change pricing and risk logic quickly and safely, and that other teams depending on the domain can build against it with confidence.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Direction & Architecture

• Define and own the technical direction and architecture for the Underwriting & Pricing domain: the pricing and rating engines, underwriting rules, risk appetite logic and quote calculation services.
• Make architectural decisions that affect multiple teams or systems, and document them clearly enough that others can act on them independently.
• Identify and drive the resolution of significant technical risk or complexity before it becomes a business problem, particularly around the accuracy and auditability of pricing and underwriting decisions.
• Lead the technical design of complex, cross-team initiatives from first principles through to delivery.

Cross-Domain Technical Leadership

• Act as the technical point of contact for other engineering teams whose systems depend on pricing, quoting or underwriting output.
• Influence architecture and engineering standards beyond the immediate team, helping the wider engineering organisation make sound decisions wherever they touch this domain.
• Represent Underwriting & Pricing in cross-team or organisation-wide technical discussions and decisions.

Product & Business Partnership

• Partner with the domain's Product Manager, Engineering Manager, and Actuarial and Commercial colleagues, to translate pricing and risk strategy into a technical direction that can support it.
• Help stakeholders understand technical trade-offs and constraints, and shape pragmatic solutions that balance commercial ambition with engineering rigour.

Mentoring & Continuous Improvement

• Develop senior engineers and emerging technical leaders within the team.
• Drive improvements to engineering practices, testing and operational rigour appropriate to a domain where correctness has a direct commercial consequence.
• Contribute to Homeprotect's wider engineering standards and architecture as the organisation's product engineering model matures.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

Essential

• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer or equivalent, owning technical direction across multiple teams, platforms or a significant business capability.
• Strong track record of defining architecture and engineering standards independently, and communicating them clearly through documentation, design and discussion.
• Experience influencing engineering decisions across teams without relying on formal authority.
• Comfortable working with rules-heavy, calculation-intensive systems, where correctness, auditability and rigorous testing matter as much as delivery speed.
• Strong hands-on experience in at least one modern backend language, such as C# or Java (or a comparable object-oriented language).
• Deep, hands-on understanding of modern software engineering practices: continuous integration and deployment, automated testing, observability and cloud-native development.
• Experience operating production systems, in a public cloud environment such as Azure or GCP, that need to be reliable, secure, performant and auditable.
• Excellent communication skills, able to build trust and drive alignment with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, including senior stakeholders.

Desirable

• Experience in general insurance, financial services or another regulated industry.
• Understanding of pricing, underwriting, actuarial or risk modelling concepts.
• Familiarity with Python, useful for working closely with Actuarial and data science colleagues on pricing and risk models.
• Experience building or evolving a platform or set of services consumed by multiple other engineering teams.
• Exposure to event-driven or distributed systems.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools to improve 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.

We encourage you to let us know if you need any extra help with your application or have any requirements at any stage of the recruitment journey, we want the process to work for you.

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, enable regulators to be able to routinely audit us, and customers to be able to understand data flows. 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.