Overview

Senior Software Engineer II – Policy Expert. Are you ready to transform the insurance industry?

Policy Expert is a forward-thinking business that loves to get things done. Leveraging proprietary technology and smart data, we offer reliable products and a wow customer experience. Since 2011 we have grown rapidly, serving over 1.5 million customers in Home, Motor and Pet insurance and being ranked the UK's No.1-rated home insurer by Review Centre since 2013. Hear from our team about what it's like working at Policy Expert.

About the Pricing Engine Team

The Pricing Engine team is the core of our business, providing the pricing calculation services that power our customer-facing products. Our purpose is to ensure that every customer who requests a quote is automatically returned an accurate, real-time decision (a quote or decline) based on their unique risk profile. As a technical expert on this team, you will be a leader in evolving our most critical and complex services. You'll apply your deep expertise to enhance the performance, scalability and reliability of the team\'s services, directly impacting the success of our business.

Your day to day

• Work with the Lead Engineer on the design and delivery of large-scale, complex backend projects, ensuring they align with our long-term architectural vision.
• Mentor and coach other engineers, sharing your experience to foster their technical growth and elevate the team's effectiveness.
• Champion engineering excellence by advocating for and implementing best practices, including robust testing, effective code reviews and high-quality coding standards.
• Evolve our systems by proactively identifying architectural needs, mitigating risks, and advocating for improvements that reduce complexity and enhance long-term maintainability.
• Shape the team's technical roadmap by translating long-term product and customer needs into clear technical opportunities.
• Champion and advance our engineering practices by mentoring others and advancing techniques such as TDD, CI/CD practices, pairing/mobbing, resilient system design and distributed systems testing.
• Own the resolution of critical production issues, leading the team to a swift resolution and driving the long-term architectural and process improvements that prevent reoccurrence.
• Contribute to and shape the future of our AWS hosted technology stack, including containerised Java & Kotlin applications; serverless applications using API Gateway and Lambdas; event-driven design with SNS/SQS; storage with Postgres, DynamoDB and S3; and orchestration with CloudFormation and GitHub Actions.

Who are you

• You are a technical expert with a proven track record of leading large and complex engineering initiatives from concept to completion.
• You have a deep and demonstrable mastery of Java and its ecosystem including Spring Boot.
• You understand how to build confidence in your releases through testing.
• You are a natural mentor, passionate about sharing your knowledge and elevating the skills of the engineers around you.
• Your expertise extends to cloud platforms (preferably AWS), where you have experience designing and evolving scalable, resilient, and observable systems.
• You actively seek to improve not just code, but also the processes and standards that enable teams to deliver high-quality work efficiently.
• You communicate complex technical ideas with clarity and confidence, influencing both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Ideally, your expertise also includes one or more of the following:

• Proven experience applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles in a complex business domain.
• Proven experience with Kotlin.
• A deep understanding of event-driven architectures and patterns.
• Experience in building and scaling high-volume, business-critical transactional systems, ideally in sectors like insurance or fintech.

Benefits

• This role will be based in our London office in a 50/50 Hybrid mode.
• We match your pension contributions up to 7%
• Private medical & Dental cover
• Learning budget of £1,000 a year + Study leave (with encouragement to use it)
• Enhanced maternity & paternity
• Travel season ticket loan
• Access to a wide selection of London O2 events and use of a Private Lounge
• Employee Wellbeing Programme
• Prayer room in Office

What We Stand for and Next Steps

We pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer. We recruit based solely on skills, knowledge, and experience, and value growing diversity in our team.

If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process to accommodate your needs, please let us know. We are committed to ensuring every candidate has an equal opportunity to succeed and will work with you to provide the necessary support.

We aim to be in touch within 14 working days of your application. You will be notified if successful or unsuccessful. Please apply even if you do not meet all the requirements.

Useful links: Glassdoor | Trust Pilot