Senior Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: London, UK

Compensation: £95,000 - £105,500 / year

Description

About Cuvva:

Cuvva is making car insurance radically better 🚙

We’re creating truly flexible products that meet people’s real needs. Using lightning-fast technology to unlock better experiences and fairer prices for our customers, Cuvva is building the future of insurance every day.

Cuvva was the first UK company to sell hourly insurance through an app. Since then we’ve sold over 3.5 million policies and supported over 500,000 customers. We’re a world-class team of over 100 people, passionate about solving our customers’ problems. Join us 🚀

The Cuvva Culture & Values:

We don’t cut corners. We try to do the right thing, even when that makes life more difficult for us 👩‍💻

We’ll speak up when we have an idea – but we know when to let go and get behind something else 💡

And we’re comfortable giving and receiving honest feedback, and trying new ways of doing things. It’s the Cuvva way.

We’re building a diverse team with different backgrounds, outlooks and experiences. So we give everyone a fair chance of getting a role at Cuvva.

If you need any adjustments or support when you’re applying to Cuvva, no worries. Just let us know.

We have the following cross-functional product teams currently, and as Senior Backend Engineer, we’ll be looking for you to join our Core Experience team:

Core Experience - addressing technical debt, smoothing our overall customer experiences and driving conversion
Growth - increasing our number of subscribers to the next level, through purchase on web, aggregators and other channels
Retention - creating features to engage and retain our users
Internal Product - building tools to support our colleagues in Customer Operations in dealing with an ever increasing number of customers
Insurance Systems - Optimising and enhancing our Insurance capabilities.

An overview of your role

Each product team autonomously owns an area of the Cuvva product. Teams are made up of engineers from multiple disciplines (backend, web, iOS, Android), product and content designers, product and engineering managers. Engineers at Cuvva come from a variety of backgrounds and have different but complementary skill sets. We don’t require a computer science degree – many of us are self-taught.

You’ll help the team achieve their goals – whether that’s building a new service in our backend platform, creating a new version of an existing API to deliver a new feature, or creating a CLI tool to automate something.

We work in a highly collaborative fashion, and maintain an open and transparent work environment. Engineers at Cuvva don’t just write code or implement against a spec. You’ll be expected and encouraged to take part in the entire product development process from problem-discovery to solution design, to implementation and rollout.

We value consistently-written, simple, resilient systems. Our backend is made up of many standalone services with a JSON-based RPC interface. We aim to create a client-agnostic API design suitable for a variety of clients (mobile apps, website, internal tooling, 3rd parties). Because we’re a regulated financial company, we have interesting and rigorous requirements to meet with regards to data security and auditability.

Most systems are written in Go (some older ones are JavaScript), backed by either PostgreSQL or MongoDB, and are hosted in a container environment. We heavily lean on AWS tooling such as S3, Lambda, and SQS, and we occasionally build integrations with more “legacy” third party systems in the insurance industry.

You can find out more about our backend systems here:

Our libraries and Go tooling is open sourced on GitHub
“Showing off our K-sortable IDs” on our blog
“How we analyse and test new pricing models” on our blog
“How we test and roll out new product features” on our blog

You'll do great here if you

Have genuine interest and curiosity about the Cuvva product, and consumer insurance in general
Enjoy working as a team to solve problems collaboratively as well as autonomously
Have around 5+ years commercial experience building rock-solid backend systems and APIs
Have a track record of shipping great quality code with real customer impact
Have experience in enhancing and scaling large scale backend systems.
Are a competent engineer with in-depth understanding of software development lifecycle
Be comfortable and productive working with Go and Javascript
Know your way around the major AWS services (or similar cloud services), and have an enthusiasm for cloud services in general
Be comfortable working with containers (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, ECR, container based CI platforms)
Exposure to cloud technologies (e.g, Network, Storage, Computing, Security) is desirable.

Benefits

As well as a competitive salary (95k - 105.5k) and equity based remuneration, benefits of working at Cuvva include:

Professional development budget
We're currently trialling a 4 day working week! (Monday to Thursday)
Health, WFH and wellbeing budget 🧘‍♂️
25 days of holiday a year (+ public holidays 🌞)
Increases to all allowances year on year
Enhanced parental leave
We’ll provide you with any tech equipment that you need
Cycle to work scheme
A day off to volunteer
One-to-one sessions with our Sanctus coaches, giving you a safe space to talk about your mental health 🧠
Salary sacrifice scheme for electric car lease
Hundreds of perks, discounts and flexi points for freebies
Doctor Care anywhere, for online appointments, referrals & prescriptions
£100 a month towards your Cuvva car insurance
Very flexible work from home or at the office arrangements 🏡
Referral bonus when you bring your friends to join the Cuvva team 💸

Workplace experience:

Office library full of great books 📚
Season ticket loans 🚂
Fully stocked fridge, pay day pizza,
Regular team lunches (even when we’re remote!)
Monthly team socials virtual & in-person (we’ve done things like; Toca social, neon sign making, Dabbers bingo, an online wine tasting, and themed virtual pub quizzes) 🎤

Cuvva Ways of Working:

We’re dedicated to our values and creating a place where people want to work, believe in what they’re doing and have clear expectations with a bunch of freedom.

We have a culture of community and collaboration - and strongly believe people should decide where and how they work.

Our approach to hybrid working is super flexible; we only ask people to come in 3 times a quarter for a team building or company event. The rest of time it’s up to you where and how you work. You can of course come into the office as much as you like, there is a happy hour and something going on at least once a week but it's entirely up to you!

Excitingly, we're currently trialling a 4 day work week until 30th September, where nothing changes in goals, pay, allowances or holiday etc, but we have a super focussed Monday to Thursday and then every Friday off! So people get a meaningful rest every week. Following the trial period we might end up back to 5 days or a different variation, or extending the trial in some way but we’re keen to see how it goes!

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Cuvva:

At Cuvva, we’re dedicated to building an environment where individuals from all walks of life feel a sense of belonging and have the support they need to thrive. To us, it’s crucial that our differences are embraced and celebrated - and that you’re able to bring your whole self to work everyday.

To ensure that DIB stays at the forefront of not only our minds but of our actions, we hold a bi-weekly session to discuss our DBI initiatives and strategy. It’s an open invite and individuals from across all different departments get involved.

In the past year, here’s a few steps we’ve taken towards creating a more inclusive and equitable environment:

Improving the diversity of our talent pool by partnering with businesses that have the same values and ethics as us, tracking diversity in our recruitment process and making changes to our hiring strategy to help us reach a wider variety of communities.
Hosting speakers and events on a quarterly basis to educate our team and spark conversation on so many important causes; including Pride at Cuvva and Black Lives Matter.
Conducting a DBI survey so we better understand where we are now, and set out key goals for 2022 on how we can improve.

To find out more about our DBI journey, check out this blog post by our Head of People, Riva Cahn-Thompson: https://www.cuvva.com/cuvva/where-we-are