Ethos was built to make it faster and easier to get life insurance for the next million families. Our approach blends industry expertise, technology, and the human touch to find you the right policy to protect your loved ones.
We leverage deep technology and data science to streamline the life insurance process, making it more accessible and convenient. Using predictive analytics, we are able to transform a traditionally multi-week process into a modern digital experience for our users that can take just minutes! We’ve issued billions in coverage each month and eliminated the traditional barriers, ushering the industry into the modern age. Our full-stack technology platform is the backbone of family financial health.
We make getting life insurance easier, faster and better for everyone.
Our investors include General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, SoftBank, and the investment vehicles of Jay-Z, Kevin Durant, Robert Downey Jr and others. This year, we were named on CB Insights' Global Insurtech 50 list and BuiltIn's Top 100 Midsize Companies in San Francisco. We are scaling quickly and looking for passionate people to protect the next million families!
About the Role:
We are looking for a hands-on engineering leader to head our foundational platform team. You’ll champion platform-wide engineering standards, ensure service reliability, and guide core service architecture that powers the Ethos platform. This role blends deep technical ownership—system design, performance optimizations, security, observability—with people leadership, coaching senior engineers, and scaling platform engineering excellence.
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Lead a high-performing team of backend/full-stack engineers driving core infrastructure, performance, scalability, and security.
- Define technical direction for foundational services and ensure engineering best practices: logging, API contracts, automated testing, PII/security, and observability.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, Infra, and Security to define platform roadmaps and execute initiatives.
- Design and evolve tools like API governance frameworks and automated validation pipelines to boost developer productivity.
- Mentor and grow senior engineers—providing feedback, career guidance, architecture leadership, and upsides.
- Participate in architecture reviews, design critique, and hands-on code contribution to uphold high engineering standards.
- Align team objectives with company OKRs, track SLA/SLO metrics, error budgets, and reliability indicators.
Qualifications:
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4 years leading platform or infrastructure-focused teams.
- Proven track record of architecting and supporting complex backend systems, microservices, and distributed architectures.
- Deep technical knowledge in service design, API contracts, database modeling, caching, scalability, and incident prevention.
- Experience implementing engineering best practices: test automation, logging, documentation tooling, observability integration, PII/security policies.
- Practical experience with observability platforms, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code stacks, and security-first development.
- Collaborative leadership with strong communication skills—balancing technical rigor with inclusive, ego-free team coaching.
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 who values diversity and inclusion and look for applicants who understand, embrace and thrive in a multicultural world. 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.
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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.
