Backend Engineer

About Marshmallow

We started Marshmallow when we found out how unfair insurance prices are for people who move to the UK. All because the industry hasn’t given this huge cohort of people a second’s thought, and isn’t set up to price them properly. 

We saw an opportunity to do things differently, so we made it our mission to back the ones who step outside the norm. Since we started, we’ve helped 100,000s of people get a fairer deal on their car insurance. Using technology, we serve people that are often overlooked by financial services companies, solving important problems for people who need it most. 

We know there are millions of marginalised customers out there. And we know that they face unique problems that most companies aren’t even aware of. We believe that our future is helping these people by learning about their experiences, and building our company around their needs. And there are strong signs that there’s a need for a company like us. Earlier this year we hit profitability, which is a huge milestone, but the most exciting thing is that we’re only just getting started.

How we work

We’re really proud of the culture we’ve created. We push for progress every day, because we know that we’ll only hit big milestones by taking lots of smaller steps. We’re always open to helping our team mates, sharing our ideas, experience and knowledge to solve problems together. We take risks, think creatively and experiment relentlessly to meet our customer’s needs, and never pass blame when things go wrong. We encourage people at all levels to take ownership of their work, and to be bold in challenging how we do things. Everyone has a voice and the opportunity to make an impact. 

And autonomy and ownership are only possible with clear direction. That’s why we collaborate to do in-depth planning twice a year, and make sure we leave with clear goals and objectives that flow from top to bottom. To make sure we’re as aligned as possible across functions, most of our work rolls up into four tribes; Acquisition, Retention, Claims and Pricing, Underwriting & Fraud. Each tribe has multiple teams embedded in it, working cross-functionally to do great work.

We’re so excited for all of the challenges up ahead, and we need more people to help us tackle them! If life at Marshmallow sounds like it could be for you, explore our culture handbook or read our blog to find out more.

Engineering at Marshmallow

Our engineers are at the heart of the solutions. They work on product builds from start to finish, solving lots of challenges to help us build fast and scale up! Our engineers cover a range of skills across frontend, backend, full stack, iOS and android, and work alongside designers, data scientists, researchers and product managers within our product teams.

Our product teams include: the Renewals and Midterm team, the Cancellations and Payments team, the Mobile team and the Claims team (to name a few!) Each team sets its own roadmap, and actively pushes our codebase forward. Learn more about our teams and how our engineers work here!

About our Claims Tech Team you’ll be joining
Claims Tech is a distributed team between Budapest and London, with a purpose to revolutionise the claims journey. Our mission is to streamline the claims process, reducing costs, enhancing the customer experience, and empowering our operational team to reach their full potential. We have big ambitions for 2025, thus we are building new Claims Tech Teams in Budapest, and moving this work from London to a single location.
Currently, we are in the process of developing our cutting-edge internal Claims Management System (CMS). This application is designed to seamlessly guide insurance claims from inception to resolution. It handles every facet of the claims process (internal, external, customer-facing), integrating with partners as well as the financial reporting.
Our commitment to innovation and excellence is at the core of everything we do, and the Claims Management System is a testament to our dedication to achieving industry-leading results in claims management.
If you're curious about our Engineering culture and ways of working, check out the Engineering Handbook.

What you'll be doing

• Working in a product engineering team enabling efficient automation for tens of thousands of policies, ensuring that we provide customers with affordable, instant, and inclusive insurance

• Participate in technical scoping, estimation and briefs. We don’t believe in heavyweight processes, and instead aspire to follow Agile principles. Whilst we borrow heavily from practices like Scrum and Kanban, we also borrow rituals from other high performing delivery teams, so we’re looking for engineers who are adaptable and open-minded with a sense of product mindset

• Work closely with the team’s product owner to understand requirements, build solutions, deliver functionality, write automation tests and build continuous delivery pipelines all the way through to deployment, monitoring and supporting these systems in production

• Help us evolve our architecture to optimise for product delivery speed

• Participate in setting the quarterly team OKRs

What we’re looking for from you

• 4+ years of experience as a software engineer

• 2+ years hands-on experience with Java 8+ & Spring

• Commercial experience with microservices

• Commercial awareness of AWS

• Commercial experience with Terraform

• You are a self-starter who likes to take ownership

• You are organised and can be relied upon to get things done

• Nice to have: experience working in a high growth start-up environment, frontend development with React, Typescript

Our Tech Stack

• Java 17 μServices

• Spring Boot with Spring Cloud

• MySQL

• Terraform

• Docker

• AWS Fargate

• Event Sourcing

Perks of the job

• Flexi-office working – Spend at least 2 days a week with your team in our Budapest office. The rest is up to you! 🏠 Plus you have 4 weeks of Work From Anywhere to use, with no need to come to the office.

• Competitive bonus scheme - designed to reward and recognise high performance 🌟

• 4-week fully paid sabbatical after being with us for 4 years 🌍

• Learning and development – Personal budgets for books and training courses to help you grow in your role. Plus 2 days a year - on us! - to further your skillset 🤓

• Mental wellbeing support – Access therapy and mental health sessions through Oliva 💚

• SZÉP card - Budget to spend on meals, leisure and accommodation 🏝

• Medicover Blue Package - An exclusive pass to top-notch healthcare services 🩺

• All You Can Move membership OR Monthly BKK pass - Unleashing your inner fitness guru or having a hassle-free commute - we've got you covered! 🤝

• Company-wide Marshmallow Engineering Hackathon twice a year 💻 

Plus a monthly team social budget, bi-weekly office lunches and Office tea, coffee and snacks!

Our process

We break it up into 3 stages:

• Initial call with Tech Talent Acquisition team (45 mins)

• Tech interview with two engineers which is centred around pair programming, systems design and operational excellence technical questions (1 hour 30 minutes)

• A past experience & culture interview with one of our Senior Leaders to check that your ways of working aligns with our processes, mission and values (1 hour)

We’ll let you know if you’re invited to an interview or not. But, as a small team with a lot of applications to consider, we can’t give individual feedback on each application

Everyone belongs at Marshmallow

At Marshmallow, we want to hire people from all walks of life with the passion and skills needed to help us achieve our company mission. To do that, we're committed to hiring without judgement, prejudice or bias.

We encourage everyone to apply for our open roles. Gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or background does not affect how we process job applications.

We're working hard to build an inclusive culture that empowers our people to do their best work, have fun and feel that they belong.

Recruitment privacy policy

We take privacy seriously here at Marshmallow. Our Recruitment privacy notice explains how we process and handle your personal data. To find out more please view it here.