Root Insurance Company

Root Insurance Company

Columbus, OH

Engineering Manager at Root Insurance (a $6B valuation startup)

$150,000-$170,000 / YEAR
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The engineering team at Root strives to be one of the most transformative engineering teams ever. We’re changing the way that car insurance works. We’re competing with companies that have been around for a century and comprise a $200B industry—and we’re doing it with astonishingly small teams.

Our tech stack includes:
Ruby / Rails backend, RSpec for testing
Javascript / React Native frontend, Mocha for testing
Small amounts of native iOS and Android
Deployment to AWS ECS using containers
Buildkite for CI

We’re scaling rapidly, and we recently launched a $6B IPO:
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/root-insurance-ipo-poised-to-disrupt-the-insurance-market-2020-10-30

Our team excels at delivering software to build Root’s products: presently, mobile apps and a backend platform for personal auto insurance. We’ve shaped our team and our way of working around this. Our engineering team would not be the most transformative team at building a mobile operating system. We’d be quite bad at that. We’re exceptionally good at building the type of software that is necessary to invoke change in the insurance industry.

For more information on engineering at Root see https://eng.joinroot.com/

Engineering Managers at Root are responsible for both technical and managerial leadership of their teams. Managers are often our strongest individual contributors and we expect them to meet or exceed all of the technical and non-technical expectations of a Senior Software Engineer.

We divide the areas of responsibility for engineers into three major areas:

Technical: The skills and knowledge that make up an engineer’s basic problem-solving toolbox.
Planning and Execution: The ability to plan and execute assigned work beyond basic technical solutions.
Working with Others: The ability to work effectively with other engineers and people in other functions.

Scope of Impact: Team/Initiative/Company

What we look for in an Engineering Manager:

Technical Skills

  • Deep understanding of technologies used in our stack, client-server architecture, and web technologies
  • Incorporates testing and thinks about reliability as a natural part of delivering working software
  • Experienced with several programming paradigms
  • Solid knowledge of databases, SQL, and version control tools
  • Adequate understanding of infrastructure and devops
  • Able to design and architect maintainable and scalable technical systems

Planning and Execution

  • Thinks critically about work to guarantee business functionality. Understands and takes into account business goals into their technical decisions.
  • Plans and supervises work for others
  • Completes complex tasks/projects in an efficient manner
  • Foresees issues and requirements for large projects and features
  • Can break down large initiatives into incrementally implementable deliverables

Working with Others

  • Mentors and grows other engineers
  • Sets and evaluates goals for direct reports
  • Provides effective and accurate technical feedback in code reviews
  • Able to work across teams to tackle complex issues
  • Able to positively influence other engineers, both directly and indirectly
  • Works with product owners, analysts and other functions to move the company’s priorities forward

About Root Insurance Company

We started Root to change the car insurance industry. Other insurance companies don't know whether people are good drivers or bad drivers. They set insurance prices based on crude demographic factors like age and gender, resulting in bad drivers paying too little, and good drivers paying too much. At Root we are changing that. We've created a way to understand how people actually drive, so that we can give the best drivers the best insurance prices. We have an opportunity to collectively save people billions of dollars a year. We received regulatory approval from the Ohio Department of Insurance in 2016 to become an officially licensed insurance carrier. This enabled us to launch and start selling policies. In 2020 and 2021 we're focused on adding top engineering talent to our current team of 200 engineers while also increasing the number of states we are licensed to sell in and building out new lines of insurances. With a stellar team, our product growing rapidly on the market, and our recent public offering, it certainly is an exciting time to join our ever-growing team!