Marshmallow’s Mission
We’re on a mission to make insurance more instant, affordable and inclusive by building the most tech-focused insurance company of our generation.
Since launch we have been the quickest growing insurtech in Europe. We are currently turning over more than $100m per annum, are valued at over $500m, have raised over $45m, and are signing up 10k new customers per month. We are one of the only UK based insurtechs to own our own insurance company - giving us total control of the entire value chain, from sign-up and pricing through to claims affording us the unrivalled ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience. We have a huge advantage over incumbents due to machine learning, automation, owning our own technology stack, comprehensive data integrations, seamless design and a fast, honest culture. We are a team of over 100 and counting, have a 4.6* Trustpilot score, and are championed by deep-pocketed investors who have backed the likes of N26, Spotify, Transferwise and Monzo. We have also been named one of London’s best startups to work for.
For the inside scoop on our culture and what working at Marshmallow is like, have a read of our culture handbook
Role Description
We are looking for an experienced Technical Lead to join a relatively new team that came together in the latter half of Q4 2020. At Marshmallow, a Technical Lead demonstrates outstanding ability to reason about our tech stack, understands engineering best practices and knows how to take a hard problem and break it down into something deliverable. They aren’t line managers, they are peer leaders who lead through knowledge, support and technical gravitas.
The Growth Team is responsible for making Marshmallow do this: . Every startup needs to grow, and it's among the most important metrics that Marshmallow is judged by. This team is responsible for making the customer signup &renewal experiences as customer-friendly as possible and for exploring acquisition channels to improve our sign-up rate. They also maintain our comparison site integrations, and implement changes to our pricing system.
The team consists of five backend and two frontend engineers, a design manager, a content designer, a product manager and an engineering manager. We handle hundreds of thousands of quote requests arriving at our site every day, and we store all data for later analysis. This high-volume of quote requests brings many tough yet exciting engineering problems. As a team, we try to focus less on the short term, and more on steering towards larger opportunities for growth with equally big payoffs.
What you will achieve in your first 12 months at Marshmallow
- Work with the Product Manager and the Engineering Manager to set quarterly OKRs for the Growth team and the engineering function of the Pricing team.
- Work with the Product Manager to challenge priorities and scope from a technical perspective
- Communicate with stakeholders, alongside the Product Manager, the technical direction and progress of a feature of a project.
- Contribute to the wider engineering team and in the relevant working groups (for backend and tech leads).
- Represent the Growth team at the monthly Engineering All Hands and Company Demo (if required to).
- Provide mentoring and sponsoring to engineers across the Engineering team.
- Work with the Engineering Manager to support resourcing on the Growth team, by surfacing engineering needs and risks.
- Help scale the Growth team to provide engineering support to the Pricing team.
Who you are
- A self-starter who likes to take ownership
- You enjoy working as part of a team and owning the work you do
- You enjoy creating and managing processes
- You are curious and have a can-do attitude
- You are patient and stay calm under pressure
- You are organised and can be relied upon to get things done
- You enjoy working in a high growth/scaling environment
- You enjoy problem-solving and creating innovative solutions
- You have a continuous delivery mindset
- You actively seek to mentor and sponsor other engineers
- You resonate with the leader-leader model
- You understand the value in delegating responsibility to help others grow
- You understand the need to balance technical debt and speed of delivery and how to communicate this to the team and the business
Requirements
Experiences that are essential
- 1+ years experience as a Technical Lead in a cross-functional product team working with OKRs
- 3+ years experience with Java 8+ and Spring
- Commercial experience with Microservices
- Commercial experience with Terraform
- Commercial awareness of AWS
- Have worked in a high-growth startup environment
- Experience mentoring and sponsoring other engineers
- Experience defining the technical strategy and the direction of a growing team
- Experience working with other engineering and product leaders
- Experience interviewing engineers
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Stock options
- 33 day holiday allowance (inc bank holidays)
- Pension
- Health insurance
- Cycle to work scheme
- Learning and training
- Budget to help you set up working from home
Logistics
- Our process consists of:
1. An interview with a member of our People team focused on your experiences and preferred ways of working
2. A take home technical task
3. A technical interview split into two sessions. The first will be with two of our engineers, an interview focused on your technical experience and a second half will be with your engineering manager and another engineer focusing on engineering best practises and team dynamics
4. A final stage culture interview with our CTO
- We are able to let you know if you are invited to an interview or not. However, we do receive a lot of applications and as a small team we are unable to give individual feedback on each application.
- We are currently working remotely but after Covid we will be taking a hybrid approach to work based on what you need to succeed in your role.