Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the role
We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Engineering teams at Ethos. You'll own the systems that power every policy we sell, from the moment a customer enters our funnel through the lifetime of that policy. This is a hands-on leadership role that can operate at both altitude and depth
You will be the outcome owner for the area you lead, accountable for the reliability, correctness, and velocity of the systems every other team depends on. Platform is where engineering leverage compounds, and you'll join at a point where you can shape the architecture, the strategy, and the culture of the team.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Own the outcomes for your domain end to end — the strategy, the technical direction, and the results.
- Hire, grow, and retain strong engineers and leads, and mentor the team through design and architecture reviews.
- Partner with Product and Staff Engineers to build the technical roadmap and run quarterly planning.
- Own cross-team architectural decisions and the internal standards other teams build on: service decomposition, event schema evolution, inter-service contract stability, and data consistency.
- Set the engineering quality bar — system reliability, test coverage, incident response SLAs, and on-call health.
- Drive operational excellence: observability, runbook quality, postmortem culture, and the reduction of toil.
- Translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped projects with clear milestones and honest timelines.
Qualifications and Skills:
Leadership
- 3+ years of engineering management experience in high-growth organizations, including managing senior ICs and leads.
- A track record of building high-performing teams and developing engineers to the next level.
- Experience managing platform teams, not just product feature teams.
- Strong written communication — clear in PRDs, design docs, postmortems, and upward reporting.
- Champions engineering quality: design patterns, code reviews, and disciplined unit, integration, and contract testing.
- A self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity and able to make trade-off decisions at speed without much guidance.
Technical
- A strong engineering foundation — you've shipped production services and can hold your own in architecture reviews without being the day-to-day coder.
- Hands-on experience with event-driven microservices: Kafka, async event processing, and schema versioning.
- Backend architecture for large, high-scale web applications, including relational databases, distributed caching, and resilience patterns such as retries and dead-letter handling.
- Experience with AWS, and with TypeScript/Node.js backend services at scale (Go or Python a bonus).
- Comfort with Datadog or an equivalent for SLO definition, alerting, and incident triage.
#LI-Hybrid
#SP1
Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t 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. 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 our California Candidate Privacy Notice.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
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.
Skills Required
- 3+ years of engineering management experience in high-growth organizations, including management of senior individual contributors and engineering leads.
- Track record of building high-performing teams and developing engineers to the next level.
- Experience managing platform teams rather than only product feature teams.
- Strong written communication in PRDs, design documents, postmortems, and upward reporting.
- Experience championing engineering quality through design patterns, code reviews, and disciplined unit, integration, and contract testing.
- Ability to work independently in ambiguous environments and make rapid trade-off decisions with limited guidance.
- Strong engineering foundation, including shipping production services and participating effectively in architecture reviews.
- Hands-on experience with event-driven microservices, Kafka, asynchronous event processing, and schema versioning.
- Experience with backend architecture for large-scale web applications, relational databases, distributed caching, retries, and dead-letter handling.
- Experience with AWS and TypeScript/Node.js backend services at scale.
- Experience with Go or Python.
- Comfort with Datadog or an equivalent tool for SLO definition, alerting, and incident triage.
What We Do
Ethos makes getting life insurance instant and easy. Our approach blends technology and industry expertise, and the human touch to deliver an incredible life insurance experience. Ethos has raised over $400 million of capital from Sequoia, Accel, Google Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Softbank and more. We are one of the largest U.S. life insurance issuers. We continue to scale quickly and are looking for passionate Ethosaurs to protect the next million families.
Why Work With Us
Ethos is powered by people from all kinds of backgrounds. We embrace a one-team, one-dream mentality, while encouraging Ethosaurs to speak their mind and act boldly, even in the absence of consensus. We believe in decentralized decision making - not decisions made by committee. Here you can have an impact and true ownership over your successes.
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