Director of Software Engineering, Enterprise

About Ethos

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 

Director of Software Engineering, Enterprise Systems
About the Role

At Ethos, technology is the foundation that powers our mission to protect One Million Families. As Director of Engineering within our Enterprise Systems group, you will lead a high-performing organization responsible for the platforms that underpin our business: policy lifecycle development, policy administration, and customer-facing portals.

You will own the strategy, architecture, and delivery of these mission-critical systems—ensuring they are secure, resilient, and scalable to meet the needs of our customers, partners, and internal teams. Partnering with Product, Operations, and Executive leadership, you'll balance rapid delivery with long-term platform health while cultivating a culture of engineering excellence across distributed teams.

Our stack: Our backend runs on and Postgres, hosted on AWS. Our front end is built in React/Redux, with modern CI/CD pipelines, observability, and a growing investment in AI capabilities

Key Responsibilities
1. Technology Strategy & Delivery

• Define and execute the engineering strategy and roadmap for Enterprise Systems
  
  
• Drive architectural decisions that ensure scalability, reliability, security, and extensibility across large distributed systems.
  
  
• Ensure predictable, high-quality delivery of enterprise features and enhancements.
  
  
• Champion integration and interoperability between platforms
  
  
• Drive best practices in distributed system design, observability, DevSecOps, and regulatory compliance.
  
  
• Partner cross-functionally to align enterprise system investments with business outcomes.
  
  

2. People & Organizational Leadership

• Recruit, develop, and retain world-class engineering talent, building diverse and inclusive distributed teams.
  
  
• Mentor and grow both engineering managers and ICs, establishing clear career paths and leadership development opportunities.
  
  
• Foster a culture of autonomy, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
  
  
• Strengthen engineering processes (e.g., technical design reviews, onboarding, knowledge sharing) to enable scale and consistent delivery.
  
  
• Establish Ethos as a destination for top engineering talent by shaping a strong internal and external technology brand.
  
  

Qualifications & Skills

• 5+ years of senior engineering leadership experience in high-growth or enterprise-scale organizations.
  
  
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of shipping large-scale, distributed, and mission-critical systems.
  
  
• Proven success managing teams of 15+ engineers, including both ICs and managers.
  
  
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architectures (AWS or equivalent), multi-region deployments, distributed databases, and event-driven systems.
  
  
• Experience designing and scaling secure, high-throughput APIs and real-time data pipelines.
  
  
• Hands-on knowledge of observability practices (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) to ensure reliability and proactive incident response.
  
  
• Proven experience with data management at scale (transactional integrity, policy lifecycle data models, customer privacy, regulatory compliance).
  
  
• Familiarity with enterprise integration patterns (service mesh, messaging queues, workflow orchestration, API gateways).
  
  
• Demonstrated ability to implement DevSecOps practices across distributed teams.
  
  
• Skilled at balancing long-term platform investments and immediate business needs.
  
  
• Bonus: Experience with insurance-grade systems such as policy administration platforms or regulated customer portals.

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 who values diversity and inclusion and look for applicants who understand, embrace and thrive in a multicultural world. 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.

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