Staff Design Engineer in London

Hi I’m Rich Ashworth, Director of Engineering at hyperexponential. Our job is to turn that into an exceptional user experience and make every step of that credible enough to trust. I'm hiring a Staff Product Engineer to help set our technical direction and build the next version of our products. You’ll be hands-on where the risk is highest.

About hyperexponential (hx): At hyperexponential, we're building the AI-powered platform that enables the world's most critical decisions in a 7 trillion industry, which risks to take, and how to price them. These are the decisions that shape real-world outcomes: whether rockets successfully launch into space, autonomous vehicles make it to market, or communities recover after major storms. Our platform brings together data, AI, and human expertise to give insurers the fastest path from submission to decision - helping them move faster, act smarter, and take on more risk with confidence.

AI is at the core of what we do - from building the world's first domain-specific AI peer programmer for insurance (think GitHub Copilot with a PhD in actuarial science) to shaping agentic workflows that reinvent how this industry operates. If that sounds like you, join us in building what comes next.

About the Model Authoring team: Model Authoring owns the products our customers use to write and manage their pricing models: the model developer experience and our actuarial agent. As the Staff Product Engineer, you will help set the team's technical direction. This is an individual contributor role, but influence is a large part of it: you'll help define the standards the team works to, raise the technical bar across pods, and own the interfaces where our problems meet those of teams elsewhere in Technology. We work in an AI-native way, and you'll help define and evolve what that means here. This is not an advisory role: we would expect you in the code where the risk is highest.

What you'll need to have done:

• Worked in an AI-native environment, and genuinely want to keep doing so. You've used AI or agentic tools in your own engineering workflow, introduced or experimented with them, and have a real view on what's worked and what hasn't.
• You understand who your users are, where their pain points are, and how your technical decisions connect to commercial outcomes.
• Owned a significant technical challenge or service end to end, with the depth to walk through it in detail - the trade-offs, the contracts, the things you'd do differently.
• Worked effectively across distributed teams - this role spans our Warsaw and London offices, so you'll need to be comfortable building relationships and influence across both.

You're unlikely to thrive here if:

• You'd rather focus purely on the technical problem than get close to users, customer pain points, and the commercial implications of what you build.
• You're not excited about helping define what the future of software engineering looks like and are prepared to embrace tooling and new ways of working to support this.

We’re building something that asks for commitment and conviction, and we want you to feel excited by the opportunity to grow with us. You'll always have clarity on pay early in the process - our Talent Partner will share details with you during initial conversations - and we're working towards publishing salary information for all roles globally. Because we're building at the intersection of technology/SaaS and insurance, our roles don't always map neatly onto traditional benchmarks. Our approach is to design compensation that's competitive in the market, fair across teams, and aligned with the impact our people make.

Equity: We offer equity across all roles at hx, making it a significant component of total compensation. Your Talent Partner will be able to share more details about this.

Benefits:

• 5,000 training and conference budget for individual and group development.
• 25 days of holiday plus 8 bank holidays (33 days total).
• Company pension scheme via Penfold.
• Mental health support and therapy via Spectrum.life.
• Individual wellbeing allowance via Juno.
• Private healthcare insurance through AXA.
• Income protection and Life Insurance.
• Cycle to Work Scheme.
• Regular remote and in-person hackathons, lunch and learns, socials, and game nights.
• Team breakfasts and lunches, snacks, drinks fridge, and a fun office at The Ministry.
• Exceptional opportunities for personal development and growth as we build something remarkable together.

Interview process:

• Initial call with our Talent team
• Hiring Manager Interview
• Skills Assessment & follow-up interview
• Values Interview
• Meet the CEO

Our commitment to Diversity: hxers are at the centre of everything we build. Diversity is not just the right thing to do, it is key to solving the complex challenges we choose to take on. Our dedicated talent team reviews all applications, and we promise to provide feedback regardless of the outcome.

Please note that background checks will be conducted as part of the hiring process to ensure compliance with our governance policies. All applicant data will be processed in accordance with data protection regulations and our privacy policy.

Location: London (hybrid)

Employment Type: Full time

Location Type: Hybrid

Department: Technology Engineering