Highwing Looking for Senior Backend Engineer at Denver, CO Full Time

About The Role

Highwing is rapidly growing its product & engineering team to support our customer growth and continue developing our open data platform for commercial insurance. We’re looking to expand our backend practice to tackle more significant challenges in the insurance space, particularly around workflows and collaboration in data-intensive environments.

We’re looking for a thoughtful backend engineer interested in digging into complex workflow challenges and working collaboratively with other functions (product, design, API, data, and customer success) to build product experiences that positively impact the day-to-day work of our end users. We’re looking for someone who shares our passion for serverless platforms and techniques, and can use those skills to limit product risk and develop our key areas of differentiation.

About You

You’re an experienced backend software engineer with a demonstrable track record in building data-intensive API-driven software platforms. You have extensive experience architecting complex systems, working with a variety of frameworks and data stores, and making the appropriate trade-offs to fit the needs of a particular problem. You recognize that products must be usable and intuitive and you’re eager to keep the end user front of mind while making technical decisions. You have worked with products over multiple releases and developed a sense for what it means to build software for long-term maintainability. You are passionate about your work but recognize that building software is a long-term team sport, not an individual sprint. You love well-thought-out architecture, maintainable code, and seamless user experiences, and are looking to help build a product that will be a key part of many users’ daily workflows.

Our stack

We’ve built our product on a modern AWS-based serverless technology stack. We strive to make technology choices that enable easy scalability of both our team and product and limit our exposure to operational burdens. We’re not technology zealots, and our team members have a high degree of autonomy to choose the tools they feel best address the challenges at hand. We iterate quickly and deploy continuously while striving to keep the quality of our user experience high and our codebases tidy. And we have a lot of fun doing it together.

Your work at Highwing

• You will be responsible for architecting, building and maintaining software to support Highwing’s product objectives and business goals
• You should be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with quick changes and a high degree of uncertainty
• A high degree of proficiency in tools and architectures for building modern web and data platforms is a must, as is a desire to learn quickly to adapt to changing technologies and business challenges
• As a member of the engineering team, you will help guide both the technical and usability aspects of the software we build and will be involved in all stages of the cycle of iterative product development
• You’ll work with partners and stakeholders to gather input and prioritize features, with designers to establish user flows and look and feel, with other engineers to implement functionality, and with customers to provide support and gather feedback
• You will have a high degree of freedom to pick the tools and frameworks that you feel best address the problems at hand and will be responsible for managing and maintaining those technology investments over their entire lifetime

Compensation

The annual salary range for this position is $120,000 to $160,000 USD.

Requirements

Your Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• You are design centered: having a high degree of product sense & strong appreciation for UX
• You are excited to explore new technologies and platforms
• Bachelor’s degree, or related field or equivalent experience
• 4+ years experience building production-ready enterprise software, or related field or equivalent experience
• Our current toolbox includes:
• Application tier: Ruby, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, GraphQL
• Backend technologies: AWS services – Lambda, Step Functions, AppSync, EventBridge, SQS/SNS
• Frontend: React/Apollo
• Data pipelines: Python, Pandas, Athena, QuickSight, Glue, Lake Formation
• Data storage: Postgres, DynamoDB, S3
• DevOps: Terraform, GitHub Actions
• 3rd Party Integrations: C#, Go, Applied Epic SDK, Microsoft Graph API

We don’t expect a single candidate to be an expert in all of the technologies we use at Highwing. Strong Ruby skills and experience with AWS’ serverless primitives are currently core to the backend engineer’s daily work at Highwing.

While we are a distributed, remote-first team, we are currently only able to consider candidates physically located within and authorized to work in the United States.

Benefits

Get to know Highwing.

Commercial insurance has trouble using its data, limiting its ability to compete effectively and grow profitably. Highwing helps insurance move faster and go further. Insurance is built from millions of individualized data points about customers, claims, costs, and more. Without these data points, calculating and transferring risk at scale wouldn’t be possible. The problem is that data is highly fragmented. Rather than businesses being buoyed by this data, they are drowning in it because there are no easy, reliable connections between systems. Highwing is the first open data platform for Insurance brokers and carriers. Think of us as the digital nervous system for Insurance. We connect data both inside and outside our platform in order to bring efficiency to the procurement of insurance.

What’s it like to work at Highwing?

Our Crew. Our team is composed of experienced designers, engineers and entrepreneurs. We believe software development is a team sport, and the best products are built by teams with diverse backgrounds who are empowered with a high degree of autonomy. We strive for rapid iteration and continuous improvement in both our products themselves and our approaches to building them. We work at a sustainable pace and know from experience that building a lasting product organization is a marathon, not a sprint.

Our Core Values

Collaboration. We are playing a team sport. Building a successful enterprise is a team effort. But it is important to distinguish a team dynamic from a family dynamic. Teams thrive on unwavering support, respect and openness – but not unconditional acceptance. Talented jerks have no place on a great team. We consistently challenge each other to improve every day – not only with respect, but with uncommon positivity.

Autonomy. This is not a little kid’s soccer team. We believe extreme autonomy is valuable in not only maintaining happy, productive people, but also in building impactful, innovative products. So we don’t all swarm to the ball. We hire intelligent, diligent, passionate people who are capable of operating in large, sometimes ambiguous problem spaces with a great deal of freedom and decision-making authority. In exchange, we expect everyone to dig in, learn deeply about the space and take initiative every day.

Improvement. “Kaizen” is part of our everyday vocabulary. Our technology, our industry and our clients are always in a constant state of flux. We must regularly evolve with them, or we will quickly fall behind. That’s why we are dedicated to practicing “Kaizen,” the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. This means we are, above all, a learning culture. We approach every problem with a beginner’s mind. We look to improve every part of what we do, every day – from our product to our process and beyond. We always strive to give and receive feedback, even when it is difficult. And we allocate time specifically for learning and reflection, so we can avoid our failures and replicate our successes.

Transparency. Having stake in the business is about more than just equity. We believe the best way to give people stake in the business is to give them full visibility into it. That’s why we share everything transparently, from ongoing client meetings and project statuses to project financials. This allows everyone to see the work they’re doing and understand how that work ladders up, connects and impacts the business. This complete context enables better collaboration, more autonomy and faster improvement.

Empowerment. We believe in leading from behind. We believe great managers should act as resources, not gatekeepers. We keep organizational hierarchy minimal, and use it only as a way to help people achieve their maximum potential. This semi “flat” culture allows anyone in the organization to not only bring radical ideas to the table, but also to pursue them fully, without bureaucratic barriers in the way.

Kindness. Challenge directly, care personally. Kindness doesn’t simply mean being nice. And doesn’t mean avoiding constructive conflict. Kindness to us means challenging ideas with positive intent. It means being intentional, honest and generous with the way we treat one another, our partners, our clients and the world. We are hell bent on building an uncommonly positive and forthright culture, because we believe this form of kindness has the power to transform our work, our business and our industry.

Highwing Benefits Overview

Comprehensive insurance: We provide comprehensive employee and family health insurance and ancillary benefits (life insurance, disability, and more).

Learning & development stipend: We believe in continuous improvement (see above) – this includes you as a person and as a professional. That’s why we provide an annual learning and development stipend that you can use however you see fit to further develop as a professional in your area of expertise or the insurance industry as a whole. Attend conferences, read books, take online learning courses, and more!

Time-off to recharge: We have a generous paid time off policy – take what you need when you need it. And when we say time-off – we really mean time-off – don’t check your emails, don’t reply to Slack – relax and recharge.