Engineering Manager, Underwriting

Life insurance is one of the world's most important products. It's also one of the hardest to build, distribute, and modernize. Bestow exists to change that.

Bestow is a leading vertical technology platform serving some of the largest and most innovative life insurers. Our platform unifies the fragmented, legacy value chain, enabling carriers to launch products in weeks instead of years. Carriers choose us to scale and operate at unprecedented speed, powered by AI and automation.

Bestow isn't selling policies. We're building the infrastructure that helps an entire industry move faster, reach more people, and deliver on its promise.

Backed by leading investors (Goldman Sachs, Hedosophia, NEA, Valar, 8VC) and trusted by major carriers, Bestow is powered by a team that moves with precision, purpose, and heart. If you want to help reimagine a centuries-old industry with lasting impact, join us.

Bestow offers flexible remote/hybrid work, meaningful benefits, equity, and substantial growth opportunities.

Bestow participates in the E-Verify Program.

The Engineering team is responsible for all technology for Bestow and the Bestow Platform. We serve employees, consumers, and enterprise customers. In addition to building software, we integrate and manage many third-party products used by employees and as part of the platform. Our major functional teams are product engineering, infrastructure, IT, data & analytics, and program management. Engineering works closely with product management and design to define and prioritize the product roadmap.

As an Engineering Manager for the Underwriting Team, you will lead a full-stack team of approximately 9 engineers—including FTEs, nearshore contractors, and offshore contractors based in Europe. You will own a subset of the underwriting product workstreams alongside an existing Engineering Manager, partnering with Product Managers, Underwriters, Designers, and external vendors to build and evolve Bestow's underwriting platform. This platform powers automated decisioning, case management, underwriter tooling, and data vendor integrations that are central to how Bestow assesses and prices life insurance risk. Our system runs on Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform and is composed of several microservices written in Go, Python, and Java, with React-based frontend applications, integrating via gRPC, REST, and async messaging patterns. You will share responsibility for operating our workloads on these platforms.

A key focus for this role is delivery management—the ability to consistently ship high-quality work on time, keep the team focused and unblocked, and coordinate effectively with adjacent teams and product stakeholders across a multi-workstream environment.

This role is open to remote candidates. #LI-Remote

This is a player/coach role with direct reports, spending approximately 20% of your time contributing production-level code.

Technical Leadership

• Remain hands-on in the code and actively participate in system design and architecture decisions

• Help steer the technical direction of your team—evaluate trade-offs, set standards, and drive alignment on how the team builds software

• Regularly review pull requests, providing thoughtful feedback that elevates code quality

• Partner with engineers on complex technical challenges, offering guidance without micromanaging

• Drive large initiatives from conception through delivery

• Champion adoption of generative AI tools—both agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) to accelerate development and AI productivity tools to streamline planning, documentation, and team communication

Delivery Management

• Own delivery outcomes for your team's workstreams—plan, track, and communicate progress against commitments with a bias toward shipping

• Manage a distributed team across time zones (US, nearshore, Europe), coordinating work to maximize throughput and minimize handoff friction

• Drive effective engineering ceremonies that keep the team aligned, surface blockers early, and promote continuous improvement

• Coordinate cross-team dependencies proactively—work with the other Underwriting EM, adjacent platform teams, and product stakeholders to sequence work and resolve conflicts

• Identify and mitigate delivery risk early—break down ambiguous work, flag scope creep, and make pragmatic trade-offs to keep initiatives on track

Underwriting Platform

• Build and evolve underwriting tooling including case review workflows, decisioning interfaces, and underwriter productivity features

• Develop and maintain data vendor integrations for automated and manual data ordering, ingestion, and normalization

• Support the decisioning engine including rules configuration, conditional ordering, and automation rate improvements

• Drive case lifecycle capabilities including queue management, assignment logic, workflow orchestration, and operational reporting

• Collaborate with AI/ML initiatives supporting the integration of predictive models and AI-assisted underwriting into platform workflows

Team Development

• Create personalized growth plans for each team member, identifying strengths and development areas

• Provide regular, constructive feedback and create opportunities for engineers to expand their skills

• Build a cohesive team culture across FTE and contractor boundaries

Strategic Vision

• Balance technical excellence with business objectives

• Demonstrate sound judgment when making technical trade-offs

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

The ideal candidate is a strong engineer first—someone who moved into management because they wanted to multiply their impact, not because they wanted to stop building software.

An Engineering Manager at Bestow is a highly technical leader who combines deep hands-on engineering ability with the organizational skills to consistently deliver results through a team.

Core Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience required

• 8+ years professional experience in the software industry, with at least 2 years of engineering management experience while keeping your coding skills strong

• Professional experience with Go, Python, or Java required—the team works across all three

• Strong frontend experience with React and modern frontend tooling (NextJS, TypeScript, testing frameworks)

• Comfortable using Docker for local software development

• Familiar with modern, scalable system architectures (load balancing, horizontal scaling, event-driven patterns, etc.)

• Experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases (comfortable writing ANSI SQL)

• Familiar with API design tools/languages (Protocol Buffers, Swagger, OpenAPI, etc.)

• Cloud computing & Kubernetes (or similar container orchestration) preferred

Delivery & Execution (Required)

• Track record of shipping: Demonstrated history of consistently delivering complex software projects on time in a team leadership capacity

• Distributed team experience: Experience managing or coordinating engineering work across time zones, including contractors or offshore team members

• Cross-team collaboration: Proven ability to work across organizational boundaries—coordinating with other engineering teams, product, design, and business stakeholders to align priorities and resolve dependencies

• Planning & risk management: Ability to decompose large initiatives into deliverable increments, identify risks early, and adapt plans without losing momentum

Technical Depth (Required)

• Full-stack capability: Able to contribute meaningfully to both backend services and frontend applications—not just review code, but write it

• System design acumen: Experience designing and evolving distributed systems, including API design, data modeling, service decomposition, and integration patterns

• Production ownership: Comfortable owning services in production—monitoring, incident response, SLA management, and operational excellence

• Generative AI fluency: Active user of AI-powered development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI) for hands-on coding, and AI productivity tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Notion AI) for managerial work such as planning, writing, and analysis. You should be able to demonstrate how you've used these tools to meaningfully accelerate your own output and your team's

Domain Experience (Nice to Have)

• Experience in insurance, insurtech, or other regulated financial services industries

• Familiarity with underwriting workflows, risk assessment processes, or case management systems

• Experience integrating with third-party data vendors or building rules/decisioning engines

Software Development Lifecycle

• Deep understanding of the entire software development lifecycle, including feature inception, system maintenance, continuous integration and release strategies, and integrating generative AI tooling into development workflows

• Ability to track key metrics and consistently meet established Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• Ability to understand complex technical problems and identify areas of risk

• Ability to go deep technically when necessary—you should be able to contribute changes to the team's codebases at any time

Leadership

• Highly organized and detail-oriented

• Proven track record of building and retaining high-performing teams

• Strong problem-solving abilities

• End-to-end ownership mentality
  

At Bestow, we’re proud to be awarded for our team members, innovative products, and culture. Our standard benefits include:

• Competitive salary and equity based on role

• Policies and managers that support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave programs

• 100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing

• Flexible work-from-home policy and open to remote

• Remote and WFH options, as well as a beautiful, state-of-the-art office in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, for those who prefer an office setting

• Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives

Recent Employer Awards include:

• Best Place for Working Parents 2023 + 2024 + 2025

• Great Place to Work Certified, 2022 + 2023 + 2024 + 2025

• Built In Best Places to Work, 2022 + 2023 + 2025

• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Texas 2022 + 2023

• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Financial Services and Insurance 2022 + 2023 + 2024

We value diversity at Bestow. The company will hire, recruit, and promote regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, pregnancy or maternity, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We understand the importance of creating a safe and comfortable work environment and encourage individualism and authenticity in every team member.

Thanks for considering a job at Bestow!