Careers

Locations

United Kingdom, Remote

Job Term

Full-Time

Company Website

We're disrupting the insurance industry with our platform Renew, which insurers use to build mathematical models to make complex pricing decisions. Modelling the answer to questions such as:

  • What are the chances that SpaceX's next launch will fail?; and
  • What are the chances of Kanye West cancelling his sell-out tour?

Renew is self-serve - allowing insurance professionals to login to our development platform and build their own models in a "pro-code" environment, using the Python open source language.

There is a huge amount of appetite in the insurance industry to learn more about Python and how it can help throughout the value chain, and at hx we believe in being net contributors to the insurance industry.

With Renew we’ve built an amazing cloud-based product around a highly flexible and scalable platform, and this has led to rapid growth of our customer base. As we further grow it we need to ensure that our platform tooling is as great as Renew itself.

This is why your mission will be to help build out quality in all of the areas that support our platform. These include, but are not limited to: super-smooth deployment and release processes, advanced monitoring and telemetry, improving elasticity and ensuring that we can scale our cloud resources in a rapid and cost-efficient way, and making sure that we are pro-active in reliability and ensuring platform quality.

Working alongside our Platform Engineering, Product Engineering, and Revenue/Customer teams, you’ll be responsible for making our platform and tooling provide the very best experience possible for our customers and our development teams. And you’ll be key in the design and implementation of the next iterations of our platform architecture.

We have tooling to support our platform, but are open to changing all facets of it – we aren’t precious about use of any particular tool and so this is a great opportunity to come in and help implement new tools, practices and ways of working, and make everything state of the art!

As a Platform Engineer you will be part of a highly skilled team who will build out and install high quality platform engineering as a discipline across our engineering teams. You’ll then implement training in these for all of our development teams, but will continue to be highly hands-on and lead on solving our most challenging platform engineering problems.

We are looking for someone with a passion for platform and tooling quality, who doesn’t accept the status quo and who won’t let minor ‘niggly’ issues remain unsolved.


Key Responsibilities

Note: hx is still a relatively early-stage business, and our culture prizes initiative highly - as such this section is a good indicator of your role, but the list isn’t exhaustive. The right candidate will seize the opportunity we have to build out an insurance industry first community, and teach it what good looks like!

Working with the Platform Engineering leads you will be responsible for:

  • Designing and implementing our platform best practices, ensuring that our AWS services are configured and used in the optimum way.
  • Improving or redesigning our build and release processes, ensuring that we have the very best possible continuous development and deployment workflows.
  • Creating state of the art monitoring and alerting, getting us to the point where we not only have self-healing infrastructure but also tooling to proactively spot and avoid issues.
  • Implementing performance monitoring and optimisation practices, ensuring that Renew performs as well as possible.
  • Designing and implementing disaster recovery and outage-restoration processes.
  • Working with our Customer Engineering team, assisting with the most difficult customer onboarding and integration issues, and writing tools to automate customer environment builds.
  • Working with our Backend Engineering team to ensure that our back-end APIs are performant, scalable, and that support tooling is in place for them.
  • Working with our Frontend Engineering team to optimise front-end performance, accessibility, and responsiveness.
  • Acting as an escalation point in the support process. The intention is that this is primarily an in-hours role, but as with all scale-outs there may be some occasional out-of-hours (evening and weekend) support requirements.


Persona

If you're the right fit for this role, you will be able to show clear evidence that you:

Are an enthusiast

This is one of the defining characteristics of all hxers, and permeates work and play for us. We actively seek out lifelong learners who enjoy "levelling-up" as part of their daily life; this means you will be:

  • Deeply interested in the start-up and high-growth sector and ecosystem: its quirks, unique characteristics and requirements
  • Passionate about quality and ensuring that our customers and developers have the very best experience and tooling available.
  • Striving for continuous improvement

Reflect hx and our values

  • Caring and empathic, you look to improve not just your own and our customers lives, but those of everyone at hx
  • Organised and a good planner - able to manage engagements with multiple customers and hx teams in parallel
  • Great at building and sharing knowledge, as a lead engineer one of your responsibilities is to propagate your knowledge to other engineers and help them develop.
  • Persistent and confident in your approach (but without ever being arrogant!)

You'll also need to be comfortable with our way of working, which is remote-hybrid, international, and service-oriented. We are an enterprise technology firm with a multinational client base - we let flexibility, customer-centricity and doing the right thing guide how and where we work.

Experience and skills

hx is far less interested in counting years over evidence of delivery, and our requirements reflect this.

To be successful in this role, you'll need to have:

  • Successfully worked in a high-performance rapid scaling AWS-based environment - ideally in a single-tenant multi-environment configuration.
  • Designed or implemented AWS-based platform architecture, alongside compute, storage, and networking (VPC, VPN or HTTP proxies)
  • Helped on the implementation of new development and deployment tooling, and/or new monitoring tooling.
  • Demonstrated a commitment to high quality and pro-active improvement.
  • Developed, or implemented changes to, system configuration and deployment tools – ideally using some of; Rust, Python, Golang, Terraform, React, NodeJS or similar
  • Experience with CI/CD, rolling releases, feature flags, and other deployment tools and techniques.
  • Worked with internal development engineering teams to scope and specify new platform features.
  • Being multi-skilled, and willing to look at every part of the platform and tooling, locate problems, design solutions, and implement them.
  • Able to contribute to blog posts and other articles about our technology.
  • Ideally worked in an insurance or financial domain or a B2B capacity, however this is not essential.
  • Provided customer hands-on support, and acted as an escalation point.
  • Bonus points if you have done this with a high-growth B2B company, where the product has been changing and updated regularly, requiring a dynamic and agile approach to ensure the content remains current!


What do we offer?

  • Competitive salary + very staff-friendly EMI share options
  • £5,000 annual learning & development allowance
  • Private healthcare (inc. dental) insurance through Vitality
  • Enhanced pension scheme through Penfold
  • 33 days annual leave (inc. public holidays)
  • Top-spec equipment (laptop, mechanical keyboards, screens, etc)
  • Regular remote hackathons, lunch & learns, socials and games nights
  • Team breakfasts and lunches, snacks, drinks fridge, fun office @ The Ministry
  • Huge opportunity for personal development and mastery as we grow together
  • Annual team trip somewhere warm!


Diversity @ hx

We are committed to diversity and equal opportunity. We’re a talented and high-energy, but low-ego and kind team who believes that the more inclusive we are, the better our work and culture is. We are not yet where we want to be in terms of balance, but it is our mission to build a team that represents a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and we are working hard towards that goal.

If you like the sound of this role but you’re not totally sure whether you’re the right fit – please apply anyway and we’ll let you know either way. Remember: you miss every shot you don’t take!

Apply now