Who this role isn't for

This is a broad, hands-on senior engineering role in a lean, high-trust environment. It rewards people energised by ownership, breadth and agentic leverage — not those looking for a defined lane or a large organisation.

Specifically, it's probably not the right fit if:

• You want to own the core product roadmap — that sits with our engineering team in Australia.
• You need greenfield to do your best work. Most of what you build extends a substantial existing platform.
• You want a fully specified ticket queue. Partner requirements arrive ambiguous and commercially loaded.
• You want to stop writing code. Most of your week is building, and we expect that to stay true as the team grows.
• You want to stay in one layer of the stack — in a lean team you'll be across the customer journey, the services behind it, and occasionally the infrastructure.
• You see AI as autocomplete, rather than something you've already restructured your work around.
• You want a purely advisory remit. This role owns delivery outcomes, not just recommendations.

What you'll bring

Required

• 5+ years building and operating production software — shipped, maintained and run by real users.
• Full-stack range — strong on one side and genuinely competent on the other.
• Comfortable in someone else's codebase — you can read a large system, find the right seam, and extend it safely.
• Integration instinct — you've debugged failures across a boundary you don't control: someone else's API, payload, or timeout. You reason about contracts, retries and idempotency by reflex.
• Credible with a partner's engineers — you can run a technical conversation with an external team and come out with a shared plan.
• Strong technical credibility in Python and modern AWS — you've owned services in production, including what happens when they break at 3am.
• Modern frontend — TypeScript and a component framework, with real care for the customer experience.
• Genuinely AI-native — you use AI agents daily, you've shipped something agentic to production, and can say what changed as a result.
• End-to-end ownership — something you designed, built, shipped, ran on-call and then improved.
• Some experience leading engineers, formally or informally — setting direction, giving hard feedback, helping someone level up.
• Modern delivery practices — trunk-based with strong CI/CD, and why that matters culturally.
• Confident communicator — design docs, pull requests and incident notes get written without being chased.
• Judgment about scope — ship the small useful thing now, keep the big rewrite in your back pocket.
• Bias for action — you spot issues early, fix root causes and push for simpler, faster, safer ways of working.

Preferred

• Exposure to insurance, fintech, or regulated financial services.
• Experience in a partner-facing, solutions or integration engineering role alongside a core product team.
• Experience with configurable or no-code product platforms (embedded insurance, white-label sales flows).
• Having worked alongside — or led — engineers building AI or ML systems in production.
• Comfort with cloud-native data warehousing (Snowflake or comparable).
• Experience in a distributed team where the core engineering team is in another region.
• Familiarity with AI safety practices — evaluations, red-teaming, guardrails, human-in-the-loop.
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related field, or equivalent experience.

Role location

Based in London, hybrid — three days a week in the office, a rhythm that supports collaboration and the fast, high-trust culture we've built. Flexibility on the other two days.

You'll work closely with colleagues in Sydney, including the engineering team that owns the core platform — writing decisions down properly and an early call once or twice a week, not a permanently shifted working day.

You'll need the right to work in the United Kingdom.

Why Open?

Open is on a mission to make it easy for everyone to get the most from their insurance. Insurance is one of the world's least digitally mature industries — confusing, paper-based and heavily intermediated. We launched in 2016 to digitise the entire insurance process, making it transparent, less costly and more reliable.

It's an exciting time to join Open and be part of a tech scale-up. We provide our team with:

• Highly competitive compensation, including share options — everyone shares in our success.
• High levels of autonomy and trust so you can do your best work.
• Growth opportunities internally — as you grow, your role can too.
• Flexible working — we are about impact, not time at your desk, including working from anywhere.
• Paid company parental leave, supporting all parents.
• Personal development allowance for learning and growth.

More about us

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and is committed to an inclusive environment for all employees. If you need any adjustments to take part in our process fairly, tell us and we'll make them — you don't need to explain why.

Open is a high-performing team that strives to achieve brilliant things every day, and we encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't exactly match the job description. We're looking for people who are intellectually curious, courageous, innovative and passionate. Our culture is truly open: we're continuously challenging each other to live our values — Always open, Play to win, Be a force for good, No excuses. Most importantly, Open is for those that want to create change and have an impact. If that sounds like you, apply for this role and let's build the future of insurance together.