Senior Platform Engineer

About Marshmallow

We started Marshmallow when we found out how unfair insurance prices are for people who move to the UK. All because the industry hasn’t given this huge cohort of people a second’s thought, and isn’t set up to price them properly. 

We saw an opportunity to do things differently, so we made it our mission to back the ones who step outside the norm. Since we started, we’ve helped 100,000s of people get a fairer deal on their car insurance. Using technology, we serve people that are often overlooked by financial services companies, solving important problems for people who need it most. 

We know there are millions of marginalised customers out there. And we know that they face unique problems that most companies aren’t even aware of. We believe that our future is helping these people by learning about their experiences, and building our company around their needs. And there are strong signs that there’s a need for a company like us. Earlier this year we hit profitability, which is a huge milestone, but the most exciting thing is that we’re only just getting started.

How we work

We’re really proud of the culture we’ve created. We push for progress every day, because we know that we’ll only hit big milestones by taking lots of smaller steps. We’re always open to helping our team mates, sharing our ideas, experience and knowledge to solve problems together. We take risks, think creatively and experiment relentlessly to meet our customer’s needs, and never pass blame when things go wrong. We encourage people at all levels to take ownership of their work, and to be bold in challenging how we do things. Everyone has a voice and the opportunity to make an impact. 

And autonomy and ownership are only possible with clear direction. That’s why we collaborate to do in-depth planning twice a year, and make sure we leave with clear goals and objectives that flow from top to bottom. To make sure we’re as aligned as possible across functions, most of our work rolls up into four tribes; Acquisition, Retention, Claims and Pricing, Underwriting & Fraud. Each tribe has multiple teams embedded in it, working cross-functionally to do great work.

We’re so excited for all of the challenges up ahead, and we need more people to help us tackle them! If life at Marshmallow sounds like it could be for you, explore our culture handbook or read our blog to find out more.

The Platform Team

The team currently consists of 2 platform engineers who manage our AWS infrastructure, maintain and develop new features for our CI/CD pipelines among other things. In 2024 we are focusing on improving our developer experience, and have taken on the challenge around improving certain aspects of our engineering culture such as finding ways to improve documentation and local development processes. These initiatives have mainly focused on our product engineering teams.

In this role you will be working within a team of other Platform Engineers, and also working closely with our Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists. Your work will involve improving processes, tooling, and automation for building, testing, and deploying ML models to our AWS cloud environment. You will have a hands-on role in designing and implementing the required infrastructure and tooling, and also help to set standards and best practices when it comes to areas such as security, monitoring and reliability.

As a Senior Platform Engineer at Marshmallow, you will work to empower our engineering teams, enabling them to deploy new features and products quickly and reliably, and allowing us to continue to scale at a rapid pace as we take on ambitious goals for growth.

Part of this growth is an ever-increasing number of Machine Learning models that we are building and running in production. From determining our pricing to evaluating fraud risks, we rely heavily on these models to make quick decisions for us. As part of this making sure our data scientists have the best tools and follow best practices is becoming increasingly important.

What you'll be doing

• Collaborate with our Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to understand their requirements and challenges

• Develop and enhance tools and frameworks to automate the building, testing, and deployment of machine learning models

• Drive operational excellence within the team, creating re-usable components to help set high a standard across different models

• Implement best practices for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) for ML models

• Optimise the performance and scalability of our ML infrastructure on AWS

• Ensure robust monitoring, logging, and alerting mechanisms are in place for ML models in production

• Monitor and address security vulnerabilities as they arise

• Facilitate knowledge sharing and provide technical guidance to team members and stakeholders

Who you are

• Able to navigate and manage ambiguity effectively, making informed decisions with incomplete information and adapting to changing priorities

• Take the initiative to identify new growth opportunities and propose creative solutions to complex problems

• Provide guidance and mentorship to our Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement

• A true collaborator - we value a collaborative approach to reach our goals and as such you should be willing and driven to get your team's input

What we're looking for from you

• Knowledgeable around AWS products, principles, and best practices e.g. IAM, VPCs

• Experienced with writing Infrastructure as Code e.g. Terraform

• Experienced with implementing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines e.g. TeamCity

• Familiarity with writing Kotlin code for working on our CI pipelines

• Able to write Python code for other parts of our infrastructure such as AWS Lambdas

• Knowledgeable around tooling and best practices on observability of production services though logs, metrics and monitoring e.g. Datadog

• Any knowledge of data science methodologies, experience working with Machine Learning models, and/or AWS SageMaker is considered a bonus, but not required

Perks of the job

• Hybrid working - Spend 3 days a week with your team in our collaborative London office 🏢

• Competitive bonus scheme - designed to reward and recognise high performance 🌟

• Flexible benefits budget - £50 per month to spend on a Ben Mastercard meaning you get your own benefits budget to spend on things you want. Whether that’s subscriptions, night classes (puppy yoga, anyone?), the big shop or a forest of houseplants. Pretty much anything goes 💰

• Sabbatical Leave - Get a 4-week fully paid sabbatical after being with us for 4 years 🏝️

• Work From Anywhere - 4 weeks work from anywhere to use, with no need to come to the office 🛫

• Mental wellbeing support – Access therapy and mental health sessions through Oliva 💚

• Learning and development – Personal budgets for books and training courses to help you grow in your role. Plus 2 days a year - on us! - to further your skillset 🤓

• Private health care - Enjoy all the benefits Vitality has to offer, including reduced gym memberships and discounts on smartwatches 🏥

• Medical cash plan - To help you with the costs of dental, optical and physio (plus more!)

• Tech scheme - Get the latest tech for less 🖥

Plus all the rest; 25 days holiday (+ bank holidays), pension, cycle to work scheme, monthly team socials and company-wide socials every month!

Our Process

We break it up into 4 stages:

• Initial call with a member of our Talent Acquisition team (30 mins)

• A past-experience interview (60 mins)

• A skill-based/technical interview (60 mins)

• A culture interview to check that your work style fits our processes and values (60 mins)

We’ll let you know if you’re invited to an interview or not. But, as a small team with a lot of applications to consider, we can’t give individual feedback on each application

Background checks

To meet our regulatory obligations as an FCA-authorised financial services company, we need to do some background checks on all new hires. That means carrying out a DBS check and making sure you don't have any live criminal proceedings. Feel free to ask our Talent Acquisition team if you have any questions about this!

Everyone belongs at Marshmallow

At Marshmallow, we want to hire people from all walks of life with the passion and skills needed to help us achieve our company mission. To do that, we're committed to hiring without judgement, prejudice or bias.

We encourage everyone to apply for our open roles. Gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or background does not affect how we process job applications.

We're working hard to build an inclusive culture that empowers our people to do their best work, have fun and feel that they belong.

Recruitment privacy policy

We take privacy seriously here at Marshmallow. Our Recruitment privacy notice explains how we process and handle your personal data. To find out more please view it here.