buildkite

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 an astonishingly small team.

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/

In this role, you would help design and build the next-generation of our pricing data infrastructure. Staff Engineers at Root are our most trusted technical experts and work across multiple teams of engineers to set and coordinate technical direction. Staff Engineers facilitate the delivery of large projects and features by helping design solutions, pair programming with other engineers, contributing to code review, and writing code themselves. They help strengthen the technical prowess of the entire engineering organization by mentoring and growing the engineers around them.

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 Staff Software Engineers:

Technical Skills

• Deep understanding of technologies used in our stack, client-server architecture, and web technologies
• Ability to architect complex, high-scale web applications and data solutions
• Incorporates testing and thinks about reliability as a natural part of delivering working software
• Experienced with several programming paradigms
• Expert-level knowledge of databases, SQL, and version control tools
• Thorough understanding of infrastructure and devops

Planning and Execution

• Plans and completes large and complex multi-person or multi-team projects
• Foresees issues and requirements for large projects and features
• Thinks critically about work to guarantee business functionality. Internalizes business goals in their technical decision making.
• Can break down large initiatives into incrementally implementable deliverables and coordinate them across multiple engineers and teams

Working with Others

• Provides effective and accurate technical feedback in code reviews
• Able to work across teams to tackle complex issues
• Mentors and grows the engineers around them
• Works with product owners, analysts and other functions to move company’s priorities forward