Backend Engineer

We’re here to change a notoriously conservative industry that’s pretty against digitization and platform automation. Can you guess what it is? Yep, it’s insurance.

That’s why we need your help to change it! We want insurance to be honest, transparent, and simple, but we’re going to need some support.

You’ll be joining a team of talented engineers from around the world to build the best and most useful insurance tools in the industry. This includes building a secure channel for our customers to send sensitive data through our web app, setting up a referral engine, and making sure our customers have a flawless sign-up process.

Your work will help us expand our existing products and launch new ones throughout Europe. You will be one of our go-to people to make core technical decisions that ensure a smooth customer experience. The platform you build will be used to make insurance a little less of a hassle and a lot more reliable.

Why apply to Feather?

• Small team, flat hierarchy, mission-driven. The usual buzzwords here, except we actually mean them. We’re small, lean, and we love what we’re doing.
• A modern tech stack to work with. We use NodeJS with TypeScript (NestJS / Express), Prisma, and Temporal. Our CI/CD is built with GitHub Actions, and we use GCP and Terraform for our infrastructure.
• You’ll be building a product that people need and are grateful for. Our excellent Trustpilot and Google reviews speak for themselves. We’ve built our products around people, and they love it!
• There's plenty of space to grow. As a senior member of the engineering team, you would have a choice to grow into a staff engineer or step on the manager's path.
• You'll have the freedom to experiment. We do hack days/hack weeks where you can experiment with new technologies and new ways of working. Our design system (dirtyswan.design) actually came out of a hack day. More on hack days can be found here.
• You'll help us contribute to open source. We're big believers in building in the open. We love the way GitLab, Artsy, Sentry, and others contribute to open source, and we're following that path too!
• You'll decide where to work from. We are a remote company mostly hiring in Europe. You'll be able to work anywhere so long that you stay close to the CET timezone.

What you'll be responsible for:

In this role, you’ll work in a small cross-functional product team with other developers, product owners, and designers.

What working at Feather will be like:

• A lot of hands-on coding on challenging projects
• Simplifying and scaling our cloud infrastructure
• Mentoring our junior and mid-level developers
• Interviewing engineers and making hiring decisions
• Collaborating and communicating with other teams and departments
• Giving technical talks as well as running technical demos and workshops
• Proposing architectural changes using our RFC process
• Writing posts for our technical blog and working on open source
• And much more!

As an example, check out some of the items from our roadmap in no particular order:

• Storing and managing sensitive customer data in a way that is secure and compliant with GDPR.
• Implementing reward systems for our customers for referring their friends and family to Feather.
• Migrating our notifications from Sendgrid to customer.io to help the non-technical part of the team automate them.
• Switching our BullMQ and Celery workers to the Temporal workflow orchestration model.
• Extracting reusable node packages from existing code and publishing them as NPM packages, both internally and as open source.
• Building an advanced recurring payment system with Stripe to make customer's subscriptions more transparent.

Your profile

• You’re an excellent communicator both around technical and non-technical people.
• You have strong knowledge in one of the following modern programming languages: JavaScript, Go, Python.
• You have experience in working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, BigQuery.
• You can write clean, maintainable, and reusable code and make design decisions regarding the architecture of the services that you’ll be implementing.
• You are familiar with modern CI/CD and developer tooling such as linters and testing frameworks.
• You know what it takes to run distributed systems and have some experience building microservices.
• You are proactive in suggesting alternative solutions and pushing your ideas.

Does this sound like a good fit for you? Apply now!

• At Feather, we are huge advocates for diversity and inclusion. From LGBTQ+ events to open discussions about eliminating bias, we highly encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.
• We encourage people without degrees to apply: we believe that what you’ve worked on and achieved is way more important than on-paper qualifications.

About Feather Insurance

Insurance: overly complicated, and you’re never sure if it’s the insurance you actually need. We’ve built a solution: a digital insurance companion for Europe. Feather was founded in 2018 by Rob Schumacher and Vincent Audoire after both of them struggled to navigate the insurance system in Germany (even though they are European). They wanted to create insurance products that were as simple as they knew it could be. That’s why we’re building an insurance to make all interactions easier and more transparent: from signing up and filing a claim to canceling. Our goal is to give people honest, unbiased advice, with the information they need to make the right decision. And, because of how complicated insurance is, we offer tools, articles, and support where people can reach out to a human about problems or questions they have.