Senior Backend Engineer

Job Title: Senior Backend Engineer 

Location: Very flexible - we’re happy for folks to work WFH and lots of us do. We only ask that you come into our London office a couple of times a month for team strategy days and socials - but of course, you're more than welcome to come in as much as you like! (+ we're working a 4 day work week - Fridays off!) 🏡

Contract: Permanent

Salary: £95,000 - £100,000  + share options + benefits listed below

About Cuvva! 

We are making cars multiplayer 🚙

We’re creating truly flexible products that meet people’s real needs. Using lightning-fast technology to unlock better experiences and fairer prices for our customers, Cuvva is building the future of insurance every day.

Cuvva was the first to sell hourly insurance to borrow a car through an app in the UK back in 2016. And we haven’t stopped innovating since. We’ve sold nearly 12 million policies, and supported over 1 million drivers and we’re just getting started. We’re a world-class team of 100 people, passionate about solving our customers’ problems. Join us. 🚀

Our Product teams

At Cuvva, Product Engineering is made up of cross-functional squads, each with full ownership over an area of the product or platform. These teams bring together Backend, Fullstack, iOS, Android, Cloud Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, and Data to work autonomously, make decisions quickly, and build impactful, reliable, user-centred products. We’ll be looking for you to join our Platform team to start off with.

• Platform - Owners of the technical foundations that drive the business. The Platform team enables other teams within the business to move faster, reduce costs and succeed. Tackling some of the most complex challenges for the business, the Platform team maintains stability, whilst driving profit growth through automation.
• Core - Dedicated to growing our market-leading short-term car insurance product, driving over £6 million in monthly sales. As a cross-functional team, we focus on enhancing the user experience by deeply understanding customer needs, introducing new products and features to solve their problems, whilst continually optimising all aspects of the funnel.
• New Ventures  - Operating as Cuvva’s internal incubator, New Ventures explores high-potental opportunities that could  become significant growth drivers for our business. New Ventures is designed to look further ahead, balancing discovery and delivery while taking calculated risks on ideas that could transform our business. 

At Cuvva, Engineers at Cuvva come from a variety of backgrounds and have different but complementary skill sets for ultimate collaboration. Within Engineering, you’re not required to have a degree, many of us are self-taught.

Our 2025 Engineering Strategy:

We’re not just here to write code, we’re here to redefine how insurance works. Our 2025 engineering strategy is built on five principles:

1. AI-first: We’re investing in automation and building AI-powered features to serve customers better and faster
2. Proactive mindset: We take initiative, spot problems early, and act fast
3. Data-driven decisions: Hypotheses are tested. Gut feel isn’t good enough
4. Pareto principle: Get 80% of the value with 20% of the effort – polish only when it matters
5. Testing-first mindset: Stability matters. We test, we ship, we learn

Our Tech Stack:

Our backend is made up of many standalone services with a JSON-based RPC interface. We aim to create a client-agnostic API design suitable for a variety of clients (mobile apps, website, internal tooling, 3rd parties). Because we’re a regulated financial company, we have interesting and rigorous requirements to meet with regards to data security and auditability.

The majority of our systems are written in Go. A few older ones are NodeJS, backed by either PostgreSQL or MongoDB and are hosted in a container environment. We heavily lean on AWS infrastructure, and occasionally build integrations with third-party systems in the insurance industry.

About the role:

As a Senior Backend Engineer, working within the Platform team, you’ll build and improve the foundational systems and infrastructure that power our insurance product. You’ll architect and deliver services that are robust, secure and scalable, all while strategically partnering with team mates and stakeholders across Cuvva to understand challenges and create long term solutions. 

You won’t just write good code, you’ll help shape how we work as a team. Whether that’s supporting technical decisions, improving delivery processes or by identifying opportunities to automate and simplify. You’ll operate methodically and collaboratively to share the future of our Platform team at Cuvva. 

This role blends technical depth with a product mindset. You’ll be as comfortable discussing performance trade-offs or service architectures as you are jumping into a feature rollout or pairing with teammates across a variety of initiatives such as building a new service in our backend platform, creating a new version of an existing API to deliver a new feature, or creating a CLI tool to automate something.

On a day-to-day basis you’ll:

• Write clean, concise, maintainable, scalable and well-tested code, being able to self review, break down, and make improvements to your own work whilst  taking part in the entire product development process from problem-discovery to solution design, to implementation and rollout
• Design, build and maintain backend services, primarily in Golang, and using AWS infrastructure and tools like Terraform, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL
• Improve the scalability, reliability and observability of our systems, reducing downtime and optimising performance
• Use metrics and telemetry to make informed decisions about where and how to invest engineering effort
• Support infrastructure changes, improve deployment pipelines, and champion automation across the business
• Identify and mitigate technical risks, and get ahead of performance or scaling bottlenecks before they become blockers
• Contribute to incident response processes and technical write-ups that help us learn and improve as a team
• Take part in code reviews and technical discussions with empathy and curiosity, offering and receiving feedback with care
• Help foster a collaborative team culture, working closely with fellow Engineers, Product Managers, and other stakeholders across the business 
• Take part in ceremonies, including standups, retros and planning, and keep our work visible (we use Shortcut)
• Stay curious and technical by pairing with peers regularly, learning  from others to help raise the bar through knowledge sharing

You’ll do great here if you have: 

• A strong background in Golang and AWS infrastructure, with experience working in production environments
• Familiarity with Terraform, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes and Redis with bonus points for NodeJS. A track record of using automation to reduce toil, increase delivery speed and cut down operational costs. Familiarity with continuous integration tools like ArgoCD
• Experience with system reliability and performance optimisation, and know what it takes to scale backend systems responsibly
• A strategic mindset, you think in terms of platforms, not just products, and value long-term thinking over quick wins
• An understanding that great engineering also means being a great teammate – clear communication, respect for others’ time, and sharing what you know
• An eye for continuous improvement, both in our systems and our processes. You’re proactive, curious, and not afraid to challenge the status quo

The hiring process: 

• Initial chat with Engineering Manager (60m)
• Take-home task sent to you (up to 4hr) 
• Technical interview & live challenge with Squad peers (90m)
• CTO chat (30m)
• Founder & CEO Chat (20m)

Benefits:

As well as a competitive salary (£95k-£100k depending on experience) and equity based remuneration, benefits of working at Cuvva include:

• Very flexible WFH set up, we only ask folks to come in a couple of times a month for team strategy days and socials - but of course, you're more than welcome to come in as much as you like! 
• A four day work week (Fridays off!) 
• Transparent salary model and bands for all roles (without sharing anyone's individual salary of course!) 
• 21 days of holiday a year + public holidays - rising with each year at Cuvva 🌞 (holidays have been prorated based on our 4DWW)
• Quarterly team socials and company events 
• Private medical insurance with Bupa
• Professional development budget
• Health, WFH and wellbeing budget 🧘‍♂️
• Increases to all allowances year on year
• Enhanced parental leave
• We’ll provide you with tech equipment to set you up for success
• Cycle to work scheme
• A day off to volunteer
• Mental Health and Coaching Support - We offer free and confidential access to comprehensive mental healthcare and coaching through Oliva. Giving you the space to talk to a coach or therapist about anything you like
• Hundreds of perks, discounts and flexi points for freebies
• Babylon Health, for online GP appointments, referrals and prescriptions
• £100 a month towards your Cuvva car insurance
• Referral bonus when you bring your friends to join the Cuvva team 💸

Referrals:

Know someone who could be right for this job? We’d love to hear from them, please drop us a note at [email protected] to let us know who you'll be referring and for which role. If they get the job, you will receive an Apple Watch! If someone has already applied to the role before we receive your email they will not be considered a referral, so please check with them beforehand to make sure 🙂

Cuvva ways of working: 

We’re dedicated to creating a place where people want to work, a place where people believe in what they’re doing, have clear expectations and a bunch of freedom. 

Our approach to hybrid working is very flexible: we only ask people to come a couple of times a month for team building or company events. The rest of time it’s up to you where and how you work. You can of course come into the office as much as you like! 

Diversity, inclusion and belonging at Cuvva:

At Cuvva, we’re dedicated to building an environment where individuals from all walks of life feel a sense of belonging and have the support they need to thrive. To us, it’s crucial that our differences are embraced and celebrated - and that you’re able to bring your whole self to work everyday.  

Research shows that men apply to jobs if they meet ~60% of criteria, but women and those in traditionally underrepresented groups tend to apply only if they check all the boxes. If you think you have what it takes but don't meet every single point above, please still get in touch. We'd love to chat and see if you could be a great fit.