Ethos Life
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!
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Site Reliability Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
The Ethos SRE group is looking for a SRE Engineer to collaborate with other teams to improve service reliability, automation and observability and improve their application maturity, reliability, and production readiness. In this role, you will create new infrastructure and support tools, help other teams debug issues, and act as advisors regarding production readiness when new services are being designed and brought online. The person in this role will exhibit good mentoring and coding skills as well as the ability to solve complex problems related to reliability . This role also requires good interpersonal skills and the ability to motivate other teams to adopt best practices concerning reliability.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Collaborate with other engineering teams to enhance the reliability and performance of applications, up to and including submitting PRs to their codebases with improvements
- Assist with automation, continuous integration and delivery of applications and configurations
- Assist other teams with designing solid foundations and best practices around running services in production environments
- Assist other teams implementing infrastructure level dependencies
- Help other teams identify, design, and monitor proper service-level indicators (SLI) and service-level objectives (SLO)
- Design and implement cross company resilient and reliable tools, resources, infrastructure and processes
Qualifications and Skills:
- 4+ years of full time software engineering experience in relevant role (Backend SWE / SRE / DevOps / Infrastructure / Operations)
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, testing, etc.
- Ability to communicate technical specifications both verbal and written
- Strong interpersonal skills
- A strong desire to remove any toil from a system
- Preferred background in distributed systems and infrastructure
- Preferred engineering experience in TypeScript, GoLang, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS
- Preferred experience with Kubernetes and Kubernetes operators
- Preferred knowledge of CI/CD systems
- Preferred experience with: Terraform, argoCD, Atlantis, GitHub Actions and DataDog
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-KP1
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Software Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer, you'll work across the stack and be responsible for building scalable platform services and systems. You’ll work closely with other engineers to build and ship key features. We are detail oriented and value clean, modular, and high-performing code. You'll help architect and build our internal standards and frameworks.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Design, build and maintain complex backend systems
- Collaborate with other engineers, PMs and non-technical stakeholders to develop and ship features
- Design, build, and maintain our API’s
- Find and solve performance issues
- Participate in code reviews
- Communicate best practices to the team
- Mentor junior engineers
Qualifications and Skills:
- 4+ years of experience
- Experience building complex architecture systems from the ground up, experience with backend architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications
- Ability to design clean APIs and understanding of performance issues
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, unit and integration testing, etc.
- Ability to communicate technical specifications both verbal and written
- Understanding of security, common attacks and defenses
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, unit and integration testing, etc.
- Ability to succinctly communicate technical specifications both verbal and written
- Command over front-end web technologies such as HTML, CSS and React
- Familiar with optimizing Core Web Vitals and loading speed performance
- Knowledge of mobile first responsive styling methodologies
- Experience working with third-party lifecycle communication infrastructure, including platforms like Iterable, Twilio, Salesforce, and Regal, to orchestrate multi-channel customer engagement
- Solid CS fundamentals – including data structures and algorithms
- Understanding of security, common attacks and defenses
- Knowledge of build systems configurations and setup - such as Webpack
- Experience with infrastructure, distributed systems, and deploying apps into a high-scale environment with integrated logging and monitoring technologies
- Expert at leveraging agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) to accelerate development workflows and improve engineering productivity
- Full stack engineering experience in Javascript, Typescript, Node or Python
#LI-Remote
#LI-MK1
The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $96,000 - $169,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits.
You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Full Stack Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a full stack engineer, you'll work across the stack and be responsible for the entire customer journey from where we store data to our server application logic, to our front end UI. You’ll work closely with our other engineers to build and ship key features. We are detail oriented and value clean, modular, and high-performing code. You'll help architect and build our internal standards and frameworks. We love engineering-wide consistency in code and have huge ambitions on both client and server side.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Collaborate with other engineers and designers to develop and ship features
- Design, build, and maintain our API’s
- Write efficient, modular, and reusable libraries and abstractions
- Design and build internal tooling to improve development efficiency
- Find and solve performance issues
- Participate in code reviews
- Communicate best practices to the team
- Mentor junior engineers
Qualifications and Skills:
- 4+ years of full time engineering experience
- Expert in Javascript
- Full stack engineering experience in Javascript/NodeJS, Python/Django,
- Expert in SQL, database design, and familiarity with PostgreSQL
- Experience with front and back end architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications
- Ability to design clean APIs and understanding of performance issues
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, unit and integration testing, etc.
- Ability to communicate technical specifications both verbal and written
- Command over front-end web technologies such as HTML, CSS, React
- Solid CS fundamentals – including data structures and algorithms
- Understanding of security, common attacks and defenses
- Knowledge of build systems configurations and setup - such as Webpack
- Experience with infrastructure, distributed systems, and deploying apps into a high-scale environment
#LI-KP1
#LI-Hybrid
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Software Engineer, Test
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer, Test, you'll have an opportunity to work with some of the best engineers in the InsureTech space. You’ll design and implement test automation that will be built ground up to support Ethos. We are detail-oriented and value clean, modular, and high-performing code. You’ll maintain test scripts and will scale up the tests for faster and reliable execution.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Be a strong quality advocate, collaborating closely with software engineers, designers, and product managers, etc. to release life-changing products
- Design and deliver risk-based test plans for new features and functionality, choosing the right method of testing for each situation or phase (scenario, exploratory, scripted, manual, automated, etc.)
- Help ensure your vertical's releases adhere to deadlines while not compromising on quality
- Pair with software engineers to identify coverage gaps, automate repeated tasks, and build regression test coverage through existing or new infrastructure
- Be a reliable, friendly source of feedback on new functionality, features, and process changes
- Awe your team by uncovering or better yet preventing corner case defects
Qualifications and Skills:
- A minimum of 3 years of software development or test framework development experience
- Proficient in at least one programming/scripting language (e.g. Javascript, Java, Python).
- Familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure tools (e.g. AWS/GCP, etc.).
- Experience with hands-on automation framework development: TestNG/Cypress/Selenium/Rest Assured/Cucumber/Jest etc.
- Expertise on test-driven development, developing different levels of automated tests, such as unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests
- Self-directed, deeply curious and you take action on your great ideas
- Detail oriented and have amazing communication skills; explaining technical problems succinctly and clearly
- Willingness to challenge existing practices in order to make them even better
#LI-KP1
#LI-Hybrid
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Senior Software Test Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a software engineer in test you will care about the quality of products along with velocity of development. You will not only drive the path for our testing infrastructure, automation testing but also deeply care about the developer productivity and CI/CD. If you should be passionate about your work and relentless about quality and automation, you will fit right in.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Be a strong quality advocate, collaborating closely with software engineers, designers, and product managers, etc. to release life-changing products
- Design and deliver risk-based test plans for new features and functionality, choosing the right method of testing for each situation or phase (scenario, exploratory, scripted, manual, automated, etc.)
- Help ensure your vertical's releases adhere to deadlines while not compromising on quality
- Pair with software engineers to identify coverage gaps, automate repeated tasks, and build regression test coverage through existing or new infrastructure
- Be a reliable, friendly source of feedback on new functionality, features, and process changes
- Awe your team by uncovering or better yet preventing corner case defects
Qualifications and Skills:
- A minimum of 5.5 to 8 years of software development or test framework development experience
- Proficient in at least one programming/scripting language (e.g. Javascript, Java, Python)
- Familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure tools (e.g. AWS/GCP, etc.)
- Experience with hands-on automation framework development: TestNG/Cypress/Selenium/Rest Assured/Cucumber/Jest etc.
- Expertise on test-driven development, developing different levels of automated tests, such as unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests
- Self-directed, deeply curious and you take action on your great ideas
- Detail oriented and have amazing communication skills; explaining technical problems succinctly and clearly
- Willingness to challenge existing practices in order to make them even better
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-PP1
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Senior Fullstack Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a Senior Full stack engineer, you'll work across the stack and be responsible for the entire customer journey from where we store data to our server application logic, to our front end UI. You’ll work closely with our other engineers to build and ship key features. We are detail oriented and value clean, modular, and high-performing code. You'll help architect and build our internal standards and frameworks. We love engineering-wide consistency in code and have huge ambitions on both client and server side.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Collaborate with other engineers and designers to develop and ship features
- Design, build, and maintain our API’s
- Write efficient, modular, and reusable libraries and abstractions
- Design and build internal tooling to improve development efficiency
- Find and solve performance issues
- Participate in code reviews
- Communicate best practices to the team
- Mentor junior engineers
Qualifications and Skills:
- 8+ years of full time engineering experience
- Expert in Javascript
- Full stack engineering experience in Javascript, Python/Django, or Ruby/Rails
- Expert in SQL, database design, and familiarity with PostgreSQL
- Experience with front and back end architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications
- Ability to design clean APIs and understanding of performance issues
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, unit and integration testing, etc.
- Ability to communicate technical specifications both verbal and written
- Command over front-end web technologies such as HTML, CSS, React
- Solid CS fundamentals – including data structures and algorithms
- Understanding of security, common attacks and defenses
- Knowledge of build systems configurations and setup - such as Webpack
- Experience with infrastructure, distributed systems, and deploying apps into a high-scale environment
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-KP1
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Senior Software Engineer, Test
Share this job
About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a software engineer in test you will care about the quality of products along with velocity of development. You will not only drive the path for our testing infrastructure, automation testing but also deeply care about the developer productivity and CI/CD. If you should be passionate about your work and relentless about quality and automation, you will fit right in.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Be a strong quality advocate, collaborating closely with software engineers, designers, and product managers, etc. to release life-changing products
- Design and deliver risk-based test plans for new features and functionality, choosing the right method of testing for each situation or phase (scenario, exploratory, scripted, manual, automated, etc.)
- Help ensure your vertical's releases adhere to deadlines while not compromising on quality
- Pair with software engineers to identify coverage gaps, automate repeated tasks, and build regression test coverage through existing or new infrastructure
- Be a reliable, friendly source of feedback on new functionality, features, and process changes
- Awe your team by uncovering or better yet preventing corner case defects
Qualifications and Skills:
- A minimum of 5 years of software development or test framework development experience
- Proficient in at least one programming/scripting language (e.g. Javascript, Java, Python).
- Familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure tools (e.g. AWS/GCP, etc.).
- Experience with hands-on automation framework development: TestNG/Cypress/Selenium/Rest Assured/Cucumber/Jest etc.
- Expertise on test-driven development, developing different levels of automated tests, such as unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests
- Self-directed, deeply curious and you take action on your great ideas
- Detail oriented and have amazing communication skills; explaining technical problems succinctly and clearly
- Willingness to challenge existing practices in order to make them even better
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-KP1
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Senior Engineering Manager
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a hands-on Engineering Manager, you’ll oversee engineers to build and ship key features. We are detail oriented and value clean, modular, and high-performing code. You'll help architect and build our internal standards and frameworks. We love engineering-wide consistency in code and have huge ambitions on both client and server side.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- 4+ years of engineering management experience in high-growth engineering organizations
- 6+ years of engineering experience as an individual contributor
- Play the role of technical SME for the pod by diving into the weeds of architecture and implementation
- Collaborate closely with product team to develop the tech roadmap
- Recruit, hire, grow, and retain A+ engineering talent
- Demonstrated track record of shipping complex products in a fast-paced environment
- Deep understanding of your pod's OKRs, metrics and KPIs to contribute to the overall strategy and vision.
Qualifications and Skills:
- Experience designing and implementing complex backend systems
- Build up technical details of existing systems
- Back end architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications experience
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, unit and integration testing, etc.
- Provide meaningful feedback to your teammates to enable their work and growth
- Ability to adjust the process of the team to maximize productivity
- Assess risk and proactively deliver a plan and timeline for the entire pod and their team members
- Write design reviews, architecture and help mentor the team on their design reviews
#LI-Onsite
#LI-PP1
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Staff Software Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role:
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in designing and building scalable platform services and systems that power our core platform. You will collaborate closely with engineers across teams, product managers, and partner functions to deliver high-quality solutions — and you’ll set a high bar for execution, clarity, and engineering quality.
This role is for an engineer who combines deep technical judgment with strong leadership and ownership. You’ll lead complex initiatives end-to-end, drive alignment across teams, and influence platform direction through architectural decisions, best practices, and innovation. You’ll serve as a multiplier — not only writing excellent code, but raising the capabilities of the teams around you.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership & Ownership
- Own and drive the technical roadmap for key platform areas, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term architecture
- Lead the design, development, and maintenance of complex backend systems and distributed services
- Make high-leverage architecture decisions that improve platform scalability, reliability, security, and developer velocity
- Identify and proactively address systemic issues across services (performance, cost, reliability, operability) and drive durable solutions
Project Leadership & Execution
- Lead multi-team initiatives from concept to launch, including planning, sequencing, risk management, execution, rollout, and post-launch iteration
- Partner cross-functionally with engineers, PMs, designers, and non-technical stakeholders to define requirements, drive alignment, and deliver outcomes
- Break down ambiguous problem spaces into structured plans and milestones; ensure accountability across teams
- Communicate strategy, progress, and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including leadership
Platform & Developer Experience
- Architect, build, and evolve API frameworks and platform capabilities used across multiple teams
- Establish and improve patterns for backend development (service templates, shared libraries, tooling, standards, and documentation)
- Champion engineering best practices across teams — consistency, testing, observability, code quality, incident response, and secure development
- Drive a culture of operational excellence through monitoring, alerting, on-call maturity, and post-incident learning
Innovation & Continuous Improvement
- Lead initiatives to evaluate and adopt new technologies, frameworks, or architectural approaches when they materially improve outcomes
- Identify opportunities for automation and tooling that reduce toil and increase engineering throughput
- Encourage experimentation and iterative improvement, creating a culture where teams ship improvements continuously and safely
Team Leadership & Mentorship
- Set a strong technical bar through code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands-on contributions
- Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers; coach senior engineers through high-impact execution and leadership moments
- Enable engineers across teams to succeed by providing clarity, context, and unblock support; help raise overall execution quality
- Represent backend/platform engineering in cross-team planning, design reviews, and strategic conversations
Qualifications and Skills:
- 10+ years of full-time engineering experience, ideally in high-scale, high-complexity environments
- Demonstrated experience designing and delivering backend architectures from the ground up and successfully evolving them over time
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, API design, data modeling, and performance tradeoffs
- Strong track record of leading multi-team projects — from planning through delivery — with measurable impact
- Hands-on engineering experience with several of the following: TypeScript, Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, React, AWS
- Skilled in software engineering best practices: design patterns, testing strategies, observability, code quality, secure development
- Proven ability to influence technical direction, align stakeholders, and drive execution across teams
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills; able to explain complex ideas to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- High degree of ownership, proactive problem-solving, and the ability to operate with urgency when needed
- Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and understanding of security principles and common attack vectors
- Familiarity with LLM implementations, including practical integration patterns (e.g., prompt orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, safety/guardrails, latency/cost considerations)
- Familiarity with end-to-end product development, including building across backend and modern web frameworks and delivering complete user-facing experiences
- Experience establishing and driving team KPIs, with a focus on measurable outcomes such as reliability, latency, cost efficiency, quality, and delivery velocity
Nice to Have (Optional)
- Experience owning and scaling a platform used by multiple product teams
- Experience driving architecture modernization (service decomposition, monolith to services, data migrations, infra upgrades)
- Experience with observability, SRE practices, incident response, and production hardening
- Proven ability to drive improvements in engineering velocity through tooling and automation
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-NG1
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life
Senior Software Engineer
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About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role
As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll work across the stack and be responsible for building scalable platform services and systems. You’ll work closely with other engineers to build and ship key features. We are detail oriented and value clean, modular, and high-performing code. You'll help architect and build our internal standards and frameworks.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Design, build and maintain complex backend systems
- Collaborate with other engineers, PMs and non-technical stakeholders to develop and ship features
- Design, build, and maintain our API’s
- Find and solve performance issues
- Participate in code reviews
- Communicate best practices to the team
- Mentor junior engineers
Qualifications and Skills:
- 7+ years of experience
- Experience building complex architecture systems from the ground up, experience with backend architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications
- Ability to design clean APIs and understanding of performance issues
- Experienced with software engineering best practices – design patterns, code reviews, unit and integration testing, etc.
- Ability to communicate technical specifications both verbal and written
- Understanding of security, common attacks and defenses
#LI-Remote #LI-MB1
The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $133,000 - $235,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits.
You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/
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.. 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.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Ethos Life