Engineering Manager (Backend)

We’re on a mission to revolutionise Home, Pet, and Motor insurance, making it clear, fair, and great value for customers. Since our inception in 2011, our breakthrough thinking and proprietary tech have won us over 1.5 million customers and the title of the UK’s No.1-rated home insurance provider for 9 years.

The Backend Engineering Chapter specialises in Policy Expert’s backend technologies, focusing on advancing the platform by improving operational excellence and creating a robust, scalable and future-proof architecture. Within this chapter you are a people manager first; your priority is to nurture our engineers. You’ll support them through challenges and help them thrive by setting clear expectations, fostering a strong learning culture and providing honest actionable feedback.

You bring technical experience to the table, not to write code, but to shape how we build, make good decisions and maintain high standards. You define the processes that enable high performing teams. A key aspect of your role will be equipping our engineers with the skills to support our platform’s operational stability and its evolution towards a domain-driven architecture. You’ll find reward in guiding your team’s specialists through these exciting technical challenges.

Your day to day:

• Drive the growth of up to 10 engineers by providing effective coaching, supportive feedback and personal development plans with well-defined objectives.
• Collaborate with Heads of Engineering, Product and other stakeholders to ensure your team has the correct skills, capacity and effective working methods.
• Use your technical experience to guide architectural choices and uphold high engineering standards, without being a hands-on coder.
• Partner with other engineering leaders and stakeholders to align your team’s work with broader company aims.
• Champion engineering excellence by improving and promoting practices such as Pairing, TDD, CI/CD, automated testing and resilient system design.
• Establish a continuously improving engineering culture that encourages initiative, psychological safety, dependability and impactful work.

Who are you:

You are an experienced Engineering Manager skilled in coaching and developing software engineers. You collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders including Engineering, Leadership, Product and Quality. You lead with a calm, measured and compassionate approach. You set high expectations while building a supportive and growth-oriented environment.

You use your solid technical background in Java to contribute effectively to architectural and design decisions, mentor engineers in best practices and guide your team in building cloud-native, scalable and resilient services. You have a strong background in the full recruitment lifecycle and apply it to attract talented engineers who drive our success. You possess an understanding of team productivity metrics (e.g. DORA, Developer Experience, Flow) and how they drive continuous improvement.

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

• Designing comprehensive observability strategies.
• Leading architecture modernisation initiatives.
• Leveraging deep, practical knowledge of major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP), including architectural best practices and cost optimisation techniques.

This role will be based in our London office in a 50/50 Hybrid mode. We match your pension contributions up to 7%. 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. Prayer room in office.

We pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer. We treat all applications equally and recruit based solely on an individual’s skills, knowledge, and experience. The quality and growing diversity of our team is a testament to this commitment. At Policy Expert, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment for all candidates. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process to accommodate your needs, please do not hesitate to let us know. We are dedicated 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 be encouraged to apply even if you do not meet all the requirements.

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