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, fullstack, iOS and android, and work alongside designers, data scientists, researchers and product managers within our product teams.

Our product teams include: the new Home team, the Growth team, the Efficiency 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!

What you'll be doing

• Working in a product 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.

• 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.

• Lead or be the main contributor to medium to large sized projects.

• Understanding of rationale and the business impact of proposed changes, and being able to adapt to changing requirements.

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

• Participate in setting the quarterly team OKRs. 

Who you are

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

• You enjoy working as part of a team and owning the work you do

• You enjoy creating and managing processes

• You are curious and have a can-do attitude

• You are patient and stay calm under pressure (might want to delete this) 

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

• You enjoy working in a high growth/scaling environment

• You enjoy problem-solving and creating innovative solutions

• You have a continuous delivery mindset

• You demonstrate that you know how and when to effectively make trade offs in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty.

• You are comfortable with changing priorities. 

• You are pragmatic in terms of when it is safe to cut corners and why.

• You are passionate about mentoring others. 

What we’re looking for from you

• Experience working in cross-functional teams in a metric-driven framework, ideally OKRs

• Strong experience with Java 8+ & Spring

• Commercial experience with Microservices architecture

• Commercial experience with AWS

• Commercial experience with Terraform

• Worked in a high growth start-up environment or product focused environment 

Our Tech Stack

• Java 17 μServices

• Spring Boot with Spring Cloud

• Dynamo DB

• Neptune DB

• Terraform

• Docker

• AWS Fargate

• Event Sourcing

Perks of the job

• Flexible working: Spend 3 days a week with your team in our new collaborative London office, and own your own working hours. The rest is up to you

  *If this arrangement doesn’t work, don’t let it hold you back. We’re always open to making reasonable adjustments if this is a barrier to you in any way. Let us know and we’ll talk about our options. 🏡

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

• Flexible benefits budget - £50 per month to spend on a Ben Mastercard meaning you get your own benefits budget to spend on things you want. Whether that’s subscriptions, night classes (puppy yoga, anyone?), the big shop or a forest of houseplants. Pretty much anything goes. 💰

• 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 💚

• Private health care - Enjoy all the benefits Vitality has to offer, including reduced gym memberships and discounts on smartwatches 🏥

• Medical cash plan - To help you with the costs of dental, optical and physio (plus more!)

• Tech scheme - Get the latest tech for less 🖥

Plus all the rest; 33 days holiday (including bank holidays), pension, cycle to work scheme, monthly team socials and company-wide socials every month!

Our process

We break it up into 3 stages:

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

• Tech interview with two members of our BE engineering team which is centred around systems design and technical questions (1 hour 30 minutes)

• A past experience interview with one of our engineering managers 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

Background checks

To meet our regulatory obligations as an FCA-authorised financial services company, we need to do some background checks on all new hires. That means carrying out a DBS check and making sure you don't have any live criminal proceedings. Feel free to ask our Talent Acquisition team if you have any questions about this!

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.