Lead Backend Engineer

Job description

At Zego, we're on a mission to do the good thing, not the insurance thing.

Insurance hasn't changed much in over a century. The way we live, work and travel has. We're building the real-time, AI-driven infrastructure that powers innovative insurance, so good drivers get cover that works the way they actually drive.

For us, AI isn't a line on a roadmap or a buzzword on a slide. It's our operating reality, and it's how we build products that back drivers instead of the old insurance playbook.

Responsibilities

• Lead several engineers within a team or workstream, guiding their work towards user value and business opportunity
• Design, build and own the Python microservices that power our insurance platform: secure, observable and built for scale
• Drive architectural discussions and decisions across multiple teams, shaping the future of our backend systems
• Deliver large, complex technical initiatives end to end, with clarity on scope, sequencing and impact
• Raise the bar on engineering excellence: testability, reliability, scalability and clean code
• Coach and mentor engineers, sharing context, feedback and support so the whole team levels up
• Improve how the team works, from CI/CD pipelines to incident response, investigating root causes and fixing them pragmatically

Requirements

• Deep backend expertise - Hands-on experience building cloud-native microservices, Python preferred, though strong experience in another language works too!
• Systems at scale - You have built distributed architectures and understand performance tuning and observability, on top of solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms and system design
• You strive for simplicity - You build systems that are easy to understand, test and maintain, and you weigh trade-offs rather than reaching for complexity
• You lead by example - Through mentoring, clear communication and a collaborative mindset, plus the tenacity to find a way forward through ambiguity or tough technical problems
• You are proactive with people beyond engineering - You raise concerns early, engage the right people, and explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
• You work AI-first - You will use AI daily here, and we mean daily. You do not need to arrive an expert, but you do need to arrive curious, experiment fast, and take ownership of getting good quickly. People who wait to be trained will find this uncomfortable