Senior Backend Engineer - New Products

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 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.
If you're curious about our Engineering culture and ways of working, check out the Engineering Handbook.

What You’ll Work On
This is a unique opportunity to make a large customer-centric impact working on a brand-new greenfield product offering for Marshmallow focused on solving a really key problem for our customer base. We're looking for Engineers who can work well in ambiguity, work autonomously with a self-starter attitude and apply their excellent skills and experience to make sensible trade-offs. You will be embedded in a completely new team within Marshmallow who will be close-knit, highly collaborative and impact focussed. While the team is small and will work mostly independently whilst building out the 0-1 solution, we support one another to get to the best outcomes and to build the right solutions.
This role requires autonomy, drive, curiosity and collaboration.

What you'll be doing

• Working in a new greenfield team launching a brand new product which will have a real impact on our customers’ lives.

• Contribute to building solutions to ambiguous product problems with appropriate sense of urgency to deliver impact within the team.

• Creates and promotes efficiency and speed within the team by autonomously solving problems, designing and implementing effective solutions.

• Partners with stakeholders 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

What we’re looking for from you

• 6+ years of software engineering experience

• Expertise in Java and Spring and the eagerness to learn more

• Experience with developing and scaling complex microservices systems

• Previous experience with identifying, analysing, and resolving system availability, reliability, and performance issues

• Experience mentoring and guiding more junior members of the team

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

Our Tech Stack

• Java 23

• Spring Boot

• AWS: (RDS, Fargate, S3, KMS, IAM, VPC, Kinesis, SQS, SNS)

• IaC with Terraform

• CI/CD with Teamcity

• Docker

• Observability with Datadog and Sentry

Perks of the job

• Flexible working: Spend 3 days a week with your team in our London office

• Sabbatical Leave - Get a 4-week fully paid sabbatical after being with us for 4 years 🌴

• Work From Anywhere - 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 🌟

• 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 budget for books and training courses to help you grow in your role and 2 learning 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 video call with a Tech Talent Acquisition partner (30 - 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 behaviour culture and past experience interview with our Chief Architect 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.