Backend Engineer (Platform) Staff+

About the job

In this role, you will have substantial ownership over the shared backend services that support all of our product work. You will drive the evolution of our platform by identifying and triaging opportunities to build or rebuild core platform functionality, making technology choices to support new services and capabilities, scoping significant independent engineering projects, and driving them to completion.

You will work closely with product engineers to identify platform needs and develop effective, but not overbuilt, solutions.

You should have polymathic interests and be eager and able to learn and assimilate technologies and domains with which you are unfamiliar, since your work will inevitably touch on many disciplinary concerns (compliance, legal across multiple jurisdictions, actuarial, financial, etc.) and many technical areas (domain modeling, API design, developer experience, observability, analytics, test, etc.).

In this role, you will speak Python, produce GraphQL, and work with CI/CD systems, infrastructure-as-code (AWS using Terraform), and a variety of AI tools.

Company & Funding

We're building the world's largest long-term insurer, using digital money and AI to serve billions of people profitably. We want anyone, anywhere, to be able to save for their future, protect their family, and build wealth across generations.

We face a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a vertically integrated life (re)insurer. Our product offerings are globally unique, making it possible for us to scale our balance sheet, build modern systems from scratch, and then directly compete to win a market that is 3% of global GDP.

We've raised over $140M to date. Sam Altman and Lachy Groom led our initial raise, and they've since been joined by leading investors in AI, insurance, and Bitcoin, including Northwestern Mutual, Apollo, Bain Capital, Pantera, Haun, Framework, Fulgur Ventures, MS&AD, Mouro, Stillmark, and Wences Casares.

Our Bermuda operating subsidiary holds the the world's only license to issue life insurance denominated entirely in Bitcoin. It's also the only company in the world with audited financials stated in Bitcoin. (If you join us, you can expect to do a lot of things no one's ever done before.)

Engineering at Meanwhile

With the advent of ubiquitous AI tooling, the dynamic range in individual engineering effectiveness is only widening.

At Meanwhile, we're planning for a world in which small, tight-knit engineering teams (supported by a small, tight-knit platform team) own entire lines of business, and are compensated accordingly.

We're attacking a huge market with the leanest, most effective team in insurance. Where incumbents employ a thousand people, we think we can make it work with a hundred or a dozen.

We're looking for hungry ICs (and former managers who see the writing on the wall) interested in pushing the boundaries of engineering productivity in a vertically integrated, regulated organization.

We're growing quickly. You will fix million-dollar bugs.

On the business side, we hire for deep domain expertise, ambition, and the creativity to figure out the previously impossible. Because our engineers work closely with people from the business, they need curiosity, flexibility, an appetite for (and the ability to digest) complex context, and strong communication skills.

Our view is that ownership is taken, not given. You will be successful here if your work progressively builds others' trust in your ability to identify, attack, and solve larger and larger problems, including those that no one else has anticipated.

We believe that "code wins arguments," that prototyping is often the best first step in a design process, and that the impact of velocity is non-linear.

You are excited by putting up multiple meaningful changes, or writing thousands of lines of code, in a day (even though you know that deleting lines of code is more exciting than writing them, and that, occasionally, deep reflection is required in order to ship anything).

You aren't fazed by building systems that don't work out — sometimes, you have to throw code away.

Intellectual honesty is non-negotiable. You love to learn and to teach, to ask questions and to answer them, and to be transparent about your uncertainty.

You are eager to learn, with the rest of the team, how to work with AI tools, including agents, in order to move faster and ship better, more complete versions of your ideas. You will experiment with new ways of working, with the expectation that some of them will be unsuccessful, and you will teach others what works.

This is the most exciting time in decades to be a competent, technically ambitious engineer. We want to offer you the opportunity to see what's really possible and how much better you can get at your craft.