Principal Engineer

It is our vision to connect the insurance community through market-leading technology. Our people are placed at the heart of this, and diversity, equity and inclusion are central to everything we do.

We know the key to achieving success is to enable a positive, inclusive, and collaborative working culture, and, as part of our commitment, we have signed up for a number of pledges and programmes designed to support and nurture our people.

No matter where you sit or which team you are a part of, we want you to know that you contribute in helping us to shape where the company will be in the future. We would love for each employee to be able to talk with pride about our company and, most importantly, consider Open GI to be an inclusive, fun and fulfilling place to work.

Our team designs and develops high-quality software for the Insurance market. We integrate with multiple external and internal platforms, aiming to provide excellent software journeys, offering a wide range of products and services, to our growing customer base. We are looking for a technical contributor to the architecture of a new product that integrates with a varied software stack using defined architectural principals. This is a fantastic opportunity to join an evolving and fast-paced team whereby you can leverage your knowledge and expertise working on a variety of technology stacks.

• Leading cross-functional product delivery teams responsible for hands-on delivery of software.
• Provides technical leadership, and advocates and implements improvements in working practices within the team with a continual focus on enablement.
• Acts as a coach and mentor, providing support and advice to other members of the Software Development department.
• Be continually aware of emerging technological trends and propose and implement new solutions and industry standard techniques.
• Enhance the scalability and performance of Open GI systems.
• Balance delivery of new product features against technical debt / evolving architecture.
• Pairing with Product Owners, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Architects, Developers and QAs to establish and implement requirements and/or resolve live operational issues.
• Collaborates across teams contributing to a holistic view of the whole platform.
• Ability to move between teams and sub-domains to support the teams in their goal.
• Sharing expertise and experience with other engineers.
• Motivating teams and fostering collaboration between individuals and teams.

Key responsibilities

• Getting code into production: ability to get code of all types – including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments – into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
• Test Driven Development: designs and develops tests so as to specify and validate what the code will do with the goal to make the code clearer, simple and bug-free.
• Performance and scalability engineering: ability to assess, recommend, design, implement, optimise and troubleshoot measures to ensure systems perform as needed. This includes responsiveness, coping with traffic load, coping with large data sets, and processing times.
• Ability to write, maintain and design the business logic of a software application, the data or services requested are available, as well as create and maintain the core databases, data and application program interfaces (APIs) to other backend processes.
• Collaboration: works jointly with others to co-create and achieve a common goal. This includes learning, practicing and experimenting with tools, techniques and frameworks that foster collaborative working environments.
• Continuous integration: ability to write code in a way that supports continuous integration of code, that is, frequently committing changes to a single trunk or master.
• Continuous delivery/deployment: ability to use techniques to support continuous delivery or deployment of new functionality
• Estimation: ability to apply various estimation techniques to predict the most realistic amount of effort required to develop or maintain software based on incomplete, uncertain and noisy input.
• Ability to design, create and evolve user-facing applications to be scalable, maintainable, secure, aesthetic and usable within the constraints imposed by the browser using a combination of languages, design skills and client-side scripts and frameworks.
• Securing applications: ability to design and implement software which exhibits good security properties, and which avoids common weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
• Clean code: applies state-of-art practices of software design and programming. The understanding of the principles, patterns and practices of writing clean code that is easy to evolve.
• Legacy remediation: ability to operate in or around older systems, and devise and execute strategies for modernising and improving them. This includes awareness of a range of legacy architectures and the patterns and tactics for the stabilisation, remediation or replacement of them. The ability to analyse the technical, business and operational pain-points of applications and broader systems. Identifying incremental steps towards a future state architecture, including techniques for stabilising with test.
• Emotional intelligence: recognises, understands and manages their own emotions and recognises, understands shares and influences the emotions of others.
• Requirement analysis and articulation: ability to use relevant artifacts, approaches and processes to understand and communicate what is required and whit it is required.
• Harnesses, intercepting and rerouting or duplicating functional and data flows, extraction of services or tiers, wrapping with facades or adapters, refactoring and strangulation and end-of-life.
• Effective communication: ability to address different messages and different audiences in a customised manner not only in order to achieve clear communication, but also to provoke the desired action when necessary.
• Agile and Lean principles: works with team to continuously improve their Agile approach by guiding and championing Lean and Agile principles for achieving quality, adaptability, speed and alignment. This includes the practices, techniques and tools that support those principles, and an understanding of when things may or may not be applicable in a situation or context.
• Giving and receiving feedback solicits and engages with feedback on a continuous basis. Has timely, actionable and meaningful conversations about performance for the purpose of shaping behaviours and fostering learning, with the goal of strengthening confidence and improving the effectiveness of self and others.
• Coaching and mentoring fellow team members: supporting the tech leads and engineers sharing experiences and knowledge to help the teams reach their goals.
• Able to move between sub-system to help solve complex problems and support the teams.

Qualifications

• Cloud Certification advantageous

Experience

• Proven software development experience, alongside technical leadership experience
• Experience of working with evolving architectures
• Experience of cloud-native architecture
• Experience working with Extreme Programming methods
• Experience working within a cross-functional delivery team
• Experience supporting their code running in a production environment

Skills

• Adaptability
• Trust
• Communicating and influencing
• Continuous improvement
• Working with others
• Customer focus
• Responding to change
• Decisiveness
• Problem solving
• Leadership
• Developing others

Aptitudes

• Drives to outcomes: focuses on results and desired outcomes and how best to achieve them. Able to execute plans through to action. Persistent to complete tasks and a strong commitment to take action that moves things along to ensure delivery of objectives.
• Ownership and accountability: takes personal accountability and ownership for their work. This includes personal follow through, making and defending difficult decisions and trade-offs, removing blockers, driving collective progress.
• Continuous improvement: advances by ongoing, incremental improvement through continuous learning, questioning the status quo and trying out creative and novel ideas. Shows curiosity and has a keen interest to drive learning for themselves and others.
• Improving CI/CD practices: suggests improvements to existing practices in the team so that there is an uplift in the quality of the product. Able to research new tools to enhance, measure and visualise quality, and implement them with the team’s support. Recognise the cause for falls in quality and takes actions to rectify them.

Our mission is to be both the Technology Partner and Employer of choice for the UK General Insurance Market. Our values are central to this vision, as they represent how we collaborate to continually deliver for our customers:

• Accountability: We own our actions and shape our success on the results we deliver
• Innovation: We tackle challenges with fresh thinking and bold ideas
• Teamwork: We work together, recognising we can’t do this without each other
• Trust: We build trust on integrity, transparency and respect

We are looking for an individual who embraces our values in their actions, decisions, communications and processes to inspire positivity and, ultimately, exceptional performance.

Benefits package

• Competitive salary depending on skills and experience
• Company pension
• Bonus opportunity
• Life assurance and critical illness cover
• Cycle to work scheme
• Perkbox – an exclusive platform offering a wide range of discounts and benefits
• Holiday entitlement of 25 days per annum pro-rata, increasing to 26 days per annum after three years of service & a holiday purchase scheme
• A hybrid approach to work, with office attendance typically required twice per month.
• Opportunity for a more flexible approach to start, finish, and lunchtimes to allow you to better manage events outside of work
• Social clubs - whether you’re into your cycling, crafts, or other hobbies, we have a number of groups at Open GI where individuals who enjoy the same pursuits can get together
• Wellbeing – wills at work scheme, employee assistance programme and mental health first aiders

Please note that this role can be based in either our Worcester, Winchester or Milton Keynes locations, and we are looking for candidates who are currently based within a 50-mile radius of our offices.

To apply for this role please fill out the application form and send us your CV.