Staff Software Engineer

About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the Role:
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in designing and building scalable platform services and systems that power our core platform. You will collaborate closely with engineers across teams, product managers, and partner functions to deliver high-quality solutions — and you’ll set a high bar for execution, clarity, and engineering quality.
This role is for an engineer who combines deep technical judgment with strong leadership and ownership. You’ll lead complex initiatives end-to-end, drive alignment across teams, and influence platform direction through architectural decisions, best practices, and innovation. You’ll serve as a multiplier — not only writing excellent code, but raising the capabilities of the teams around you.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership & Ownership
Own and drive the technical roadmap for key platform areas, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term architecture
Lead the design, development, and maintenance of complex backend systems and distributed services
Make high-leverage architecture decisions that improve platform scalability, reliability, security, and developer velocity
Identify and proactively address systemic issues across services (performance, cost, reliability, operability) and drive durable solutions
Project Leadership & Execution
Lead multi-team initiatives from concept to launch, including planning, sequencing, risk management, execution, rollout, and post-launch iteration
Partner cross-functionally with engineers, PMs, designers, and non-technical stakeholders to define requirements, drive alignment, and deliver outcomes
Break down ambiguous problem spaces into structured plans and milestones; ensure accountability across teams
Communicate strategy, progress, and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including leadership
Platform & Developer Experience
Architect, build, and evolve API frameworks and platform capabilities used across multiple teams
Establish and improve patterns for backend development (service templates, shared libraries, tooling, standards, and documentation)
Champion engineering best practices across teams — consistency, testing, observability, code quality, incident response, and secure development
Drive a culture of operational excellence through monitoring, alerting, on-call maturity, and post-incident learning
Innovation & Continuous Improvement
Lead initiatives to evaluate and adopt new technologies, frameworks, or architectural approaches when they materially improve outcomes
Identify opportunities for automation and tooling that reduce toil and increase engineering throughput
Encourage experimentation and iterative improvement, creating a culture where teams ship improvements continuously and safely
Team Leadership & Mentorship
Set a strong technical bar through code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands-on contributions
Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers; coach senior engineers through high-impact execution and leadership moments
Enable engineers across teams to succeed by providing clarity, context, and unblock support; help raise overall execution quality
Represent backend/platform engineering in cross-team planning, design reviews, and strategic conversations
Qualifications and Skills:
10+ years of full-time engineering experience, ideally in high-scale, high-complexity environments
Demonstrated experience designing and delivering backend architectures from the ground up and successfully evolving them over time
Strong understanding of distributed systems, API design, data modeling, and performance tradeoffs
Strong track record of leading multi-team projects — from planning through delivery — with measurable impact
Hands-on engineering experience with several of the following: TypeScript, Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, React, AWS
Skilled in software engineering best practices: design patterns, testing strategies, observability, code quality, secure development
Proven ability to influence technical direction, align stakeholders, and drive execution across teams
Excellent verbal and written communication skills; able to explain complex ideas to technical and non-technical stakeholders
High degree of ownership, proactive problem-solving, and the ability to operate with urgency when needed
Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and understanding of security principles and common attack vectors
Familiarity with LLM implementations, including practical integration patterns (e.g., prompt orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, safety/guardrails, latency/cost considerations)
Familiarity with end-to-end product development, including building across backend and modern web frameworks and delivering complete user-facing experiences
Experience establishing and driving team KPIs, with a focus on measurable outcomes such as reliability, latency, cost efficiency, quality, and delivery velocity
Nice to Have (Optional)
Experience owning and scaling a platform used by multiple product teams
Experience driving architecture modernization (service decomposition, monolith to services, data migrations, infra upgrades)
Experience with observability, SRE practices, incident response, and production hardening
Proven ability to drive improvements in engineering velocity through tooling and automation
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-NG1
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.. 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.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.