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Job Title
Director of Customer Engineering and Support
Job Description
We are looking for a Director of Engineering to join us to lead our customer facing engineering, IT and application support teams across UnderwriteMe. This role will lead three areas:
Our support teams have undergone some significant change over the last 18-months, having been moved to operate separately as part of a reorg after the retirement of our COO. We are now looking to establish a central centre of excellence for all aspects of support within UnderwriteMe. Bringing the teams together will ensure we can share best practices and ways of working as well as removing some of the knowledge silos between teams. Our ultimate aim is to use our customer support as a differentiator, creating a delightful experience for all of our customers.
Our solutions architecture teams have also been located in different parts of the organisation. We have recently decided to also centralise these teams to enable a more consistent experience for our customers, as well ensuring that application support and solutions architecture cover the right queries from our customers.
Systems wise we run on Mac devices with an M365 identity and email solution, utilising Jamf for device management. Our support teams use Jira Service Management for interactions with customers.
What you will be Doing
You will lead all of our customer facing engineering and support teams, as well as our internal IT team, reporting directly into the VP Engineering (who looks after all engineering for UnderwriteMe).
You will also be a member of the Engineering leadership at UnderwriteMe, sitting alongside four other directors, collaborating with other engineering leaders, working on improving our overall engineering function.
As the leader of our solutions architecture and application support you will establish best practices for interfacing with our customers. Working closely with the Directors who lead each of our products, as well as the Customer Support and RevOps teams, to ensure the right work is completed in solutions architecture, support and within our engineering teams.
As the leader of our IT team you will work closely with our parent company to continue maturity our IT estate, meeting company policies and processes. You’ll use metrics to establish the current state and demonstrate the improvements we are making.
Your day to day will involve creation and execution of a roadmap of improvements that move our customer engineering and support towards your defined target state. You will support your team, acting as a mentor and coach, helping the delivery of your vision. You will introduce new technologies where needed and remove technologies that provide little additional value.
You will define and execute a plan for a target organisational structure to deliver a delightful support experience to all of our customers both external and internal. There may be a small amount of additional growth in the teams, but predominantly this is about ensuring we are investing our people in the right areas and we have the right operating models in place.
You look to optimise the cost of our IT and software licensing spend, making this transparent and visible to teams and driving down our overall cost of delivering our products to customers.
You will be comfortable acting as part of an out of hours, on call rota, supporting our transformation towards a ‘you build it, you run it’ target state. As this is a global team you will also be comfortable flexing your hours where needed to ensure you can work across time zones.
What type of person fits the role:
You are technically great, with a strong understanding of modern support processes and IT security best practices data. You can sit with engineers and debate technical concepts but are also capable of describing these concepts to non-technologists clearly. You thrive on moving between different levels of detail depending on what the situation needs. You understand engineering leadership best practices with regards to creating autonomous cross functional teams and how to measure their success. You are a visionary who drives the team, providing clarity and guidance to enable us to move at speed.
You are passionate about delivering a delightful customer experience. You use empathy to understand your customers and push your teams to listen and learn from customers before jumping to solutions. It frustrates you when you observe poor customer experience yourself and ‘computer says no’ is not a concept that you can tolerate.
You believe in building out a modern IT estate that can support the needs of both our internal and external customers. You use customer research (i.e. feedback / interviews etc) and your own experience to shape the future direction of IT and our customer facing support. You see the IT and support as a product and operate like a Product Manager of that product. You care deeply about creating an IT estate that enables all customers to self-serve, removing impediments and enabling speed and autonomy for customers. You care more about the outcomes than the technology we use.
You are a creative problem solver. Working with your team, direct reports and peers, you directly solve problems. You care more about solving the problem than simply talking about it. You look for creative solutions to problems, understanding when to focus on dealing with the root causes and when a quick fix will suffice.
You are a curious coach. You love helping others to improve. Your curiosity means you want to understand why things work the way that they do, before you look to improve them. Your coaching extends across all your relationships and you’re comfortable coaching people both within and outside of engineering.
You have a growth mindset. You respectfully challenge the status-quo. You are continually looking to improve yourself and your teams. You actively seek out and give feedback and do this in a way that builds strong relationships with your team and peers. You think about working iteratively, using experiments and data to drive how you make decisions.
You thrive in a fast-paced environment with large amounts of uncertainty. You are comfortable working to transform an organisation, accepting this means that everything is not working perfectly today.
You are an experienced IT leader with significant experience of running service and support desks. Ideally you will have also run externally facing service desks and provided solutions architecture style support to customers. Ideally you will have worked with Macs and the Microsoft ecosystem, bonus points if you’ve also used Jamf.
You are an expert with modern IT and support tooling, and you have a passion for automating everything.
You have experience in a regulated environment, ideally working with standards such as ISO 27001 / SOC2 and know how to structure IT processes and tooling to meet the needs of those standards. You are comfortable facing off to internal risk and compliance teams and acting as a subject matter expert in external audits. You are comfortable working on disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
You have experience and are comfortable facing off to senior stakeholders (ideally c-suite). You know how to present information that tells a story and can change how you tell this story depending on the stakeholders.
Extra bonus - You’ve worked in an organisation that sells SaaS products and understand the patterns used to build and support them
If you feel that you’ve met most of the requirements above, even if it isn’t everything, please do reach out and apply.
About UnderwriteMe
UnderwriteMe is an Insurtech software business and subsidiary of Pacific Life Re (PL Re), a global life and pensions reinsurance firm. We have a vision to help everyone purchase protection insurance by using data and disruptive technology to transform our partners and markets in order to make their underwriting processes as quick and efficient as possible.
Our core products are:
• Decision Platform - a B2B enterprise platform that provides a best-in-market Underwriting Rules Engine used by over 30 insurers to power their underwriting decisions. The product is sold across UK & Ireland, Asia-Pacific and North America. The platform combines our engine with technology to source and process third-party information supporting underwriting decisions for insurers. We are already working on capabilities, powered by AI, to make these decisions even more efficient.
• Protection Platform - a B2B2C marketplace used by over 15,000 advisors to power quoting and purchase of protection products in the UK. We currently deliver 16% of the UK markets protection policies and we are already working to increase our reach.
Working for UnderwriteMe
Joining UnderwriteMe means being part of a technology company that is committed to bringing a fresh and dynamic approach to insurance. You’d be working with a team of highly technical experts made up of people with backgrounds in software, fintech, and insurance.
Every person in our global team is valued for the unique qualities they bring to our business and we seek to build their expertise and support their individual ambitions at every step. Of course, we take our work seriously and we know our team can operate under great pressure. We work hard and thrive on achievement, but we also know how to have fun and relax too. We regularly host a range of team building days to strengthen our team's connection with each other and reflect on their successes.
Providing employees with a healthy work-life balance is very important to our culture. We have a wide range of employee benefits and we host regular social activities and wellbeing initiatives. We are also committed to supporting our employee's involvement in their communities, by actively fundraising, hosting charity events, and overseeing volunteering opportunities.
Benefits (Only for Permanent and Fixed Term Employees)
Leave
25 days of annual leave with option to buy/sell more days
Adoption and fertility leave
Generous enhanced parental leave
Healthcare
Comprehensive private insurance coverage for employee and dependents
Group Life Insurance coverage of 9x basic annual salary and Group Income Protection up to 75% of basic annual salary
Optical benefits
Savings & Retirement
15% combined employee/employer contributions
Wellness
Subsidized gym membership
Access to Employee Assistance Program
Cycle to Work and Electric Car Salary Sacrifice Scheme
Time off for volunteering
Charitable matching of employee donations
hackajob is partnering with UnderwriteMe to fill this position. Create a profile to be automatically considered for this role—and others that match your experience.