Staff Software Engineer

About Ethos

Ethos was built to make it faster and easier to get life insurance for the next million families. Our approach blends industry expertise technology and the human touch to find you the right policy to protect your loved ones.

We leverage deep technology and data science to streamline the life insurance process making it more accessible and convenient. Using predictive analytics we are able to transform a traditionally multi-week process into a modern digital experience for our users that can take just minutes! Weve issued billions in coverage each month and eliminated the traditional barriers ushering the industry into the modern age. Our full-stack technology platform is the backbone of family financial health.

We make getting life insurance easier faster and better for everyone.

Our investors include General Catalyst Sequoia Capital Accel Partners Google Ventures SoftBank and the investment vehicles of Jay-Z Kevin Durant Robert Downey Jr and others. This year we were named on CB Insights Global Insurtech 50 list and BuiltIns Top 100 Midsize Companies in San Francisco. We are scaling quickly and looking for passionate people to protect the next million families!

About the Role:

As a Staff Backend Engineer you will play a critical role in designing and building scalable platform services and systems that power our core platform. You will collaborate closely with engineers across teams product managers and partner functions to deliver high-quality solutions and youll set a high bar for execution clarity and engineering quality.

This role is for an engineer who combines deep technical judgment with strong leadership and ownership. Youll lead complex initiatives end-to-end drive alignment across teams and influence platform direction through architectural decisions best practices and innovation. Youll serve as a multiplier not only writing excellent code but raising the capabilities of the teams around you.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Ownership

• Own and drive the technical roadmap for key platform areas balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term architecture
• Lead the design development and maintenance of complex backend systems and distributed services
• Make high-leverage architecture decisions that improve platform scalability reliability security and developer velocity
• Identify and proactively address systemic issues across services (performance cost reliability operability) and drive durable solutions

Project Leadership & Execution

• Lead multi-team initiatives from concept to launch including planning sequencing risk management execution rollout and post-launch iteration
• Partner cross-functionally with engineers PMs designers and non-technical stakeholders to define requirements drive alignment and deliver outcomes
• Break down ambiguous problem spaces into structured plans and milestones; ensure accountability across teams
• Communicate strategy progress and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences including leadership

Platform & Developer Experience

• Architect build and evolve API frameworks and platform capabilities used across multiple teams
• Establish and improve patterns for backend development (service templates shared libraries tooling standards and documentation)
• Champion engineering best practices across teams consistency testing observability code quality incident response and secure development
• Drive a culture of operational excellence through monitoring alerting on-call maturity and post-incident learning

Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Lead initiatives to evaluate and adopt new technologies frameworks or architectural approaches when they materially improve outcomes
• Identify opportunities for automation and tooling that reduce toil and increase engineering throughput
• Encourage experimentation and iterative improvement creating a culture where teams ship improvements continuously and safely

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Set a strong technical bar through code reviews architectural guidance and hands-on contributions
• Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers; coach senior engineers through high-impact execution and leadership moments
• Enable engineers across teams to succeed by providing clarity context and unblock support; help raise overall execution quality
• Represent backend/platform engineering in cross-team planning design reviews and strategic conversations

Qualifications and Skills:

• 10 years of full-time engineering experience ideally in high-scale high-complexity environments
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering backend architectures from the ground up and successfully evolving them over time
• Strong understanding of distributed systems API design data modeling and performance tradeoffs
• Strong track record of leading multi-team projects from planning through delivery with measurable impact
• Hands-on engineering experience with several of the following: TypeScript Go Python PostgreSQL Kubernetes React AWS
• Skilled in software engineering best practices: design patterns testing strategies observability code quality secure development
• Proven ability to influence technical direction align stakeholders and drive execution across teams
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; able to explain complex ideas to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• High degree of ownership proactive problem-solving and the ability to operate with urgency when needed
• Strong CS fundamentals including data structures algorithms and understanding of security principles and common attack vectors
• Familiarity with LLM implementations including practical integration patterns (e.g. prompt orchestration retrieval evaluation safety/guardrails latency/cost considerations)
• Familiarity with end-to-end product development including building across backend and modern web frameworks and delivering complete user-facing experiences
• Experience establishing and driving team KPIs with a focus on measurable outcomes such as reliability latency cost efficiency quality and delivery velocity

Nice to Have (Optional)

• Experience owning and scaling a platform used by multiple product teams
• Experience driving architecture modernization (service decomposition monolith to services data migrations infra upgrades)
• Experience with observability SRE practices incident response and production hardening
• Proven ability to drive improvements in engineering velocity through tooling and automation

#LI-Hybrid
#LI-NG1

Dont meet every single requirement If youre excited about this role but your past experience doesnt align perfectly with every qualification in the job description we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse inclusive and authentic workplace.

We are an equal opportunity employer who values diversity and inclusion and look for applicants who understand embrace and thrive in a multicultural world. We do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color national origin gender sexual orientation age marital status veteran status or disability status. Pursuant to the SF Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records.

To learn more about what information we collect and how it may be used please refer to ourCalifornia CandidatePrivacy Notice.

Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ or @.
We will never ask for payment banking details or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address please treat it as fraudulent.