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Ethos is a life insurance technology company transforming how insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten through a three-sided platform serving consumers, agents, and carriers. The company offers instant, accessible life insurance products with no medical exams required.
You will lead the Platform Engineering teams, owning the systems that power every policy from customer acquisition through the lifetime of the policy. This is a hands-on management role where you operate at both strategic and technical depth.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own end-to-end outcomes for your domain: strategy, technical direction, and results
- Hire, grow, and retain strong engineers and leads; mentor through design and architecture reviews
- Partner with Product and Staff Engineers on technical roadmap and quarterly planning
- Own cross-team architectural decisions and internal standards: service decomposition, event schema evolution, inter-service contracts, and data consistency
- Set the engineering quality bar for system reliability, test coverage, incident response SLAs, and on-call health
- Drive operational excellence through observability, runbooks, postmortem culture, and toil reduction
- Translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped projects with clear milestones and realistic timelines
Required qualifications:
- 3+ years of engineering management in high-growth organizations, including managing senior ICs and leads
- Track record building high-performing teams and developing engineers to the next level
- Experience managing platform teams (not just product feature teams)
- Strong written communication in PRDs, design docs, postmortems, and upward reporting
- Champion of engineering quality: design patterns, code reviews, disciplined testing
- Self-starter comfortable with ambiguity and making trade-off decisions at speed
- Strong engineering foundation with shipped production services; can hold your own in architecture reviews
- Hands-on experience with event-driven microservices: Kafka, async event processing, schema versioning
- Backend architecture expertise for large, high-scale web applications: relational databases, distributed caching, resilience patterns (retries, dead-letter handling)
- AWS experience and TypeScript/Node.js backend services at scale (Go or Python a bonus)
- Comfort with Datadog or equivalent for SLO definition, alerting, and incident triage
