Head of Engineering
At Open, we exist because we believe that insurance does not have to be seen as complicated
or costly. We’re an AI-powered platform transforming insurance globally — making it more
transparent, cost-effective, and customer friendly. Since launching in 2016, we’ve grown into a
certified B Corporation, operating across ANZ and the UK, and building modern infrastructure
that brings wonder into insurance.
Engineering is how we earn the trust of our partners and customers, and where we turn Open’s
strategy into shipped product. This is a rare opportunity to lead engineering at a scaling
AI-native insurer: setting the technical direction across product, data and user experience,
driving an AI-first engineering culture in which humans and AI agents build together, and laying
the technical foundations for Open’s growth from an ANZ-rooted business into an established
player in the UK and EU market.
What you’ll do
You’ll lead engineering for our application, data and user-experience platforms. Reporting to the
Chief Technology & AI Officer and a peer to TechOps, Solution Architecture and Product, you’ll
lead three engineering leaders and their teams of ~25+ engineers, data engineers and AI
technicians across AU and UK as we scale from ANZ into the UK and EU.
This is a hands-on role. You’ll be close to the work — in design reviews, pull requests and
incident calls, coaching tech leads and unblocking squads. The lift is operational as much as
strategic.
You’ll be measured on driving up three things across the function:
Execution excellence
- Cut cycle time from idea to production, quarter on quarter, by using the best of modern
software delivery and agentic development.
- Anticipate engineering requirements early in partner onboarding and new-geography
launches.
- Translate Product priorities into a clear engineering roadmap, with sequencing and
trade-offs made transparent.
AI-native ways of working
- Make AI agents a first-class part of how Engineering works – pair every engineer with
agents for design, code, review, test and ops, and set the bar for how fast a small team
can ship.
- Own Open’s agentic product capability end-to-end: with Product, ship AI agents for
sales, claims and support that build on the Insurance Companion foundation.
- Build the evaluations, guardrails and human-in-the-loop patterns that let us deploy
GenAI safely in a regulated industry.
Platform resilience
- Hold squads to account for the full lifecycle of what they ship – design, build, run,
measure, improve – not just the merge.
- Own availability, incident response and engineering health across the application, data
and UX platforms.
- Work hand-in-hand with TechOps, Solution Architecture and InfoSec on reliability,
security and governance – including the foundations for multi-region growth.
Who this role isn’t for
This is a broad engineering leadership role in a lean, high-trust environment. It rewards people
who are energised by ownership, ambiguity and agentic leverage, not those looking for a
defined lane or a large organisation to lead.
Specifically, it’s probably not the right fit if:
- You’re coming from a 200+ engineer organisation and expecting a similar layer cake of
managers, programme managers and platform teams: this role is much closer to the
work, by design.
- You’re a hands-off architect or pure people manager: technical credibility with builders is
essential here, and you’ll still read pull requests and step into design reviews.
- You see AI as autocomplete: this role is for someone who has already restructured how
a team works around agents, not someone who plans to “start exploring” GenAI.
- You’re motivated primarily by growing a very large team: the function is intentionally lean
and high-leverage, and we expect agentic tooling to keep it that way.
- You want a purely advisory remit. This role owns delivery outcomes: what ships, when
and at what quality; not just recommendations.
What you’ll bring
Required
- 10+ years in engineering, with 5+ years leading leaders – you’ve run multi-team
engineering organisations and managed managers as well as senior individual
contributors.
- A track record of scaling teams through the 20 → 50+ transition, with quality and
shipping velocity intact.
- Genuinely AI-native as a leader – you’ve built and shipped agentic systems in
production, use AI agents in your own work every day, and have restructured how a
team works around human + agent collaboration. You have an opinion on which
problems agents should own end-to-end versus assist on.
- Strong technical credibility – confident in Python and modern AWS, comfortable with
cloud-native data warehousing (Snowflake or comparable). You can still read a pull
request and ask the right question.
- Architectural judgment for scale – you’ve made the call on when to decompose a
monolith, when to leave well alone, and how to introduce loose coupling pragmatically.
- Modern delivery practices – you’ve led teams through the move to trunk-based
development and stronger CI/CD, and know how to make this stick culturally, not just
technically.
- Comfortable operating collaboratively alongside peer leaders in TechOps, Solution
Architecture, Product and InfoSec — effective without direct authority over those
functions.
- Confident communicator from engineer to senior stakeholder — you translate gnarly
technical problems into plain English and steer non-technical colleagues towards the
right call.
- Mentor and multiplier – you’ve grown senior engineers into tech leads and tech leads
into managers; people seek you out for guidance.
- Bias for action – you spot issues early, fix root causes and keep pushing for simpler,
faster, safer ways of working.
Preferred
- Experience operating across multiple geographies (ANZ and UK, or equivalent),
including the data-residency and in-country considerations of regulated financial
services.
- Exposure to the insurance, fintech, or regulated financial services sector.
- Experience building configurable or no-code product platforms (embedded insurance,
white-label sales flows, partner-driven experiences).
- Experience scaling frontend, data and AI/ML engineering in parallel as internal services.
- Familiarity with AI safety practices — evaluations, red-teaming, guardrails,
human-in-the-loop.
- Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.
Role location
Where you’ll work
This role is based in Sydney, Australia. We work in a hybrid model, with teams in the office on
Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We’ve found this rhythm genuinely supports collaboration
and the kind of fast, high-trust culture we’ve built. You’ll have flexibility on the other days to work
in a way that suits you.
Why Open?
Open is on a mission to make it easy for everyone to get the most from their insurance.
Insurance is one of the world’s least digitally mature industries – for years it’s remained
confusing, paper-based and heavily intermediated. We launched in 2016 to build a global,
AI-powered platform that digitises the entire insurance process, making it transparent, less
costly and more reliable.
It’s an exciting time to join Open and be part of a tech scale-up. We provide our team with:
- Highly competitive compensation, including share options – we believe in paying people
what they’re worth and having everyone in our company share in our success.
- High levels of autonomy and trust so you can do your best work.
- Growth opportunities internally – as you grow, your role can too.
- Flexible working – we are about impact, not time at your desk.
- We encourage freedom and responsibility, including the ability to work from anywhere.
- Paid company parental leave, supporting all parents as they balance career and family.
- Bonus leave – additional paid leave designed to support rest and wellbeing once
standard leave has been utilised.
- Personal development allowance — flexible annual benefit to support learning, wellbeing
and personal growth.
More about us
Open is a certified B Corporation using business as a force for good, and we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building an inclusive, high-performing team.
We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement – we’re looking for people who are curious, courageous, innovative, and motivated by impact.
If you want to help build the future of insurance, we’d love to hear from you.
