Staff Engineer (Backend)

Who we are:

Nirvana is on a mission to modernize commercial insurance and enable a safer world. Our technology platform delivers modern insurance & risk management to not only help our customers protect their businesses, but actually improve safety for everyone.

To start, we’re transforming the legacy, $750B+ commercial insurance industry through cutting-edge predictive models using real-time IoT data (~50B connected devices by 2030), AI powered automation to deliver instantaneous quotes & faster underwriting, & proactive, data-driven insights to help customers prevent accidents. 

Backed by top-tier VCs including General Catalyst & Lightspeed Ventures, Nirvana became the fastest insurtech EVER by crossing >$10M run rate in under 6 months, more than 2x faster than best-in-class insurtechs. 

About the team:

The Underwriting (UW) Engineering team is at the forefront of developing and managing the UW product strategies and building the UW platform to allow us to scale seamlessly to multiple Business lines. Our platform strategy enables us to scale to new business lines with ease, while ensuring a seamless experience and efficiency for internal teams. Additionally this team will spearhead the conception and delivery of AI first strategy to drive efficiency and consistency of underwriting decisions. Underwriting is at the core of what we do at Nirvana - enabling both the top line boost while maintaining strong profitability, fueling our financial success. We have ambitious plans to directly influence the company’s top-line growth.
Join us on this exciting journey to redefine the future of insurance and make a tangible impact on our industry's landscape!

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical strategy for the UW domain in Nirvana

• Co-own the product strategy partnering with product lead(s), striking the right balance of driving business impact while ensuring the right technical foundations are in place

• Design and lead the implementation of UW platform to enable Nirvana’s expansion to multiple business lines. 

• Lead a team of world class engineers, playing a force multiplier effect, growing out more technical leadership in the team. 

• Spearhead innovations on both technical vision as well as AI innovations in the UW domain, partnering with cross functional stakeholders in R&D; and internal and external customers.

• Guide cross-functional engineering efforts, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives.

About you:
You thrive in high ownership organizations, with a flat hierarchy and have the ability to drive step function business impact. You bring strong ability to architect, design, and lead the development of complex business systems balancing the strategic needs of the system with the ambitious goals of the business. You are comfortable with ambiguity, working across functions to untangle clear definitions of problem statements, bring hands-on approach to solving these problems, and employ a data-driven approach to decision making. Your ability to delve deeply into technical details while maintaining a clear articulation of the broader system architecture inspires and guides engineering teams. 

If the above narrative sounds like you, you’re going to be a great fit! Beyond that, here’s what we’d like to see:

• 8+ years of experience - ideally a mix of start up / scale up and mature / large scale experience.

• Proven track record of delivering ambiguous projects across multiple team members or teams

• Thinking in terms of architecture more than code, while maintaining a hands-on approach. This role will require you to code out the critical components of the systems you own.

• Deep expertise in designing and implementing highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and distributed systems. 

• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud-native technologies (containers, serverless, etc.).

• Proficiency in Go, Java, or other programming languages. Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and data streaming technologies. 

Preferred Skills (Optional)  

• Experience in underwriting and/or insurance industry

• Proficiency in analyzing real-time data to guide decision-making. 

• Experience in building models to predict future risks and opportunities.