Fullstack Job: Backend Engineer

Our mission

Definitely not a sweet shop.

We're the tech company making insurance more accessible and more affordable for as many people as possible.

We’re proud of our journey so far. We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of customers get fairer cover, all while polishing a 4.6 star Trustpilot score. But we’re just getting started.

Over the next 2 years, we’re planning to help even more people by launching products and services across different sectors and countries

If you're looking for a challenge, our next chapter is set to be an exciting one

How we work

We've created a culture of trust which allows us to work autonomously without fear of failure, to challenge decisions, and be heard. It empowers us to drive our own careers and to move at unparalleled speed. And because we're treading new ground, we're all mastering new skills along the way.

Explore our Culture Handbook to find out more about life at Marshmallow, or read our blog!

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 15 μServices

• Spring Boot with Spring Cloud

• Dynamo DB

• Neptune DB

• Terraform

• Docker

• AWS Fargate

• Event Sourcing

Perks of the job

• Flexi-office working – Spend at least 3 days a week with your team in our new collaborative London office. The rest is up to you!

• Flexible benefits budget - £50 per month to spend wherever you like on a Ben Mastercard

• 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

• Equity – Get options in Marshmallow as part of your offer, and have a real stake in the company’s success

• 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 4 stages:

• Initial call with Tech Talent Acquisition team (30 mins)

• A skill-based interview where you will discuss your previous experience with one of our Engineering Managers (45 minutes)

• Tech interview with two Tech Lead’s which is centred around systems design and technical questions (1 hour 30 minutes)

• A culture interview with Xenofon Papadopoulos our VP of Engineering or one of our dedicated Bar Raisers (Appointed Advocates of our Culture) 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.