Engineering Manager

We’re Quandri, our mission is to unlock the world’s insurance data so brokerages and agencies can best serve their clients. Our Renewal Intelligence Platform is designed to help brokerages save time, increase profitability, and drive better outcomes for their staff, clients, and business. 

We saw 3x ARR growth last year and have plans to continue to grow both revenue and our team this year. Named one of LinkedIn’s Top Canadian Startups in 2024, we have already made a big impact on the insurance industry. However, what matters most is making our customer’s lives better one renewal at a time. We want you to be a critical part of that journey! We’re a hybrid company, with ⅔ of our team in Vancouver and the rest distributed. For those in Vancouver, we have an office in Gastown that we expect people to be at three days a week. We understand both the advantages of some flexibility around personal lives, and the positive interpersonal effects of in-person collaboration.

Running a profitable personal lines book of business is harder than ever for insurance brokerages. Market conditions, rising costs, talent shortages, and staffing constraints are just some of the challenges that hinder profit margins, scalability, and exceptional client service. Trusted by 5 of Canada’s top 10 brokerages, Quandri is transforming the renewal process with AI-driven automation, enabling proactive workflows and delivering data-driven insights.

Today’s renewal process is often reactive, with brokers focusing on clients who request help rather than adopting a proactive, data-driven approach. Quandri is revolutionizing renewals by offering a platform that uses AI and automation to streamline operations. This allows brokerages to retain more business, enhance client and staff experiences, reduce E&O risk, and boost sales through upselling and cross-selling.

Looking to make an impact in your next role? How about transforming an entire industry? At Quandri, we’re unlocking new frontiers in insurance. To do that, we model our culture as a crew of interstellar astronauts. As Quandronauts, we’re committed to building a company that is diverse and multi-faceted. We’ve raised venture capital from top US and Canadian investors to help us achieve our mission, and are now scaling to achieve this.

About the Role:

Quandri, a pioneering AI robotics company, is seeking a talented Software Engineering Manager based in Vancouver, BC. We’re looking for leaders and trailblazers who excel at handling large-scale projects, complex challenges, and undefined requirements to empower our customers. In this role, you will oversee a team of engineers dedicated to designing, developing, testing, and deploying innovative customer experiences. You will ensure operational excellence and uphold the highest quality standards.

As a key member of our team, you will own the responsibility of maintaining and enhancing system architecture, contributing to both its robustness and scalability. Your expertise will be crucial in mentoring other developers, guiding them to grow their technical skills. You will also be responsible for hiring new talent and training them to ensure they meet our high standards. We expect effective communication and ownership of technical documentation, ensuring clarity and comprehensiveness. The ideal candidate is adaptable, curious, and driven, with a passion for diving deep into technical problems and a desire to make a significant impact.

Working with product owners, head of engineering, customer success, designers, and business stakeholders, you will own the team’s health, operational excellence, and deliverables.

What you’ll do:

• Refining Ambiguous Requirements and Defining System Architecture: This involves interpreting and clarifying project objectives and user needs. Your role is to translate these into a coherent system architecture, ensuring that the design meets both current and anticipated future requirements.
• Breaking Down Work: This involves decomposing the system architecture into manageable components or modules. You'll need to define how these components interact and assign them to team members based on their skills and workload.
• Seeking Challenge and High Performance: This position is suited for someone who thrives in a challenging environment and is eager to work closely with a high-performing team to achieve ambitious goals.
• Effective Communication: A key aspect of your role involves clear and articulate communication of design decisions, changes, and challenges. This includes actively participating in or leading various forms of team interactions such as design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge transfer sessions. Your ability to communicate complex technical concepts in an understandable way is crucial for aligning the team and stakeholders with the project's goals and processes
• Collaborating with Stakeholders: Work closely with a diverse group of stakeholders, including Product Managers, Data Engineers, Operations, internal technical teams, and leadership. Your role will be to identify business opportunities and develop end-to-end solutions and product roadmaps.
• Building a Strong Team: Hire, coach, and mentor individuals, fostering a strong cross-functional organization. Your leadership will be key in developing the team's skills and capabilities.
• Ensuring Technical Excellence: Provide technical expertise and leadership throughout product life cycles. Influence best practices for software engineers on your team and ensure the operational excellence of high-stake services. This includes regular reviews and updates to meet evolving requirements and security standards.
• Thriving in Challenging Environments: This role is suited for someone who seeks challenges and is eager to work closely with a high-performing team to achieve ambitious goals.

Experience:

• Over 4 years of engineering team management experience.
• More than 8 years of professional engineering experience.
• At least 6 years of experience leading the definition and development of multi-tier web services.
• In-depth knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and live-site operations.
• Proven experience partnering with product or program management teams.
• Proficient in software development best practices, with a history of deploying and operating software at scale.
• Experienced in designing and implementing databases, backends, and APIs, ensuring efficient data management and seamless integration of different system components.

Bonus points if you have:

• Bachelor's degree, preferably in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or related IT discipline; or equivalent experience.
• Experience in working with startups
• A candidate who exhibits exceptional proficiency in Python. The ideal applicant should have a strong track record of developing complex solutions using Python and demonstrate a deep understanding of its capabilities and best practices. An ability to write clean, efficient, and well-documented code in Python is highly desirable.
• Experience in communicating with senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
• Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

Our guiding principles:

• Customers at the core. We put the customer at the center of all we do. At a basic level, we believe business success comes down to talking to customers and building something they want. We don’t listen to customers and just take what they say blindly, but we think critically about it and build what they need. Customers are the core of everything we do, and our business exists to serve them. We prioritize their needs over all else within the company.
• Move with urgency. There are times when we need to move slowly and deliberately, but we default to acting fast and with urgency. We slow down when necessary, but this should be a deliberate choice. Businesses become more lethargic as they grow, this principle is designed to fight this fact.
• Be curious. We understand the world by being curious and asking why. We aren’t satisfied with surface level understanding, and seek a deeper understanding of why things are the way they are. Don’t take someone’s word for it or the answer “because that’s how we do it.” Understand why and dig deep.
• Excellence in execution. We know that what separates good from great is a high level of execution. We commit ourselves to excellence in everything that we do, from delivering an amazing product to writing a great email.
• Act like an owner.  We’re all owners of the business and act like it. We follow through on commitments, own our results and think long-term.
• Fight for simplicity. The law of increasing functional information states that systems evolve to become more complex over time. At Quandri, we believe there is sophistication in simplicity; as such, we intentionally fight for streamlined solutions and are committed to the uncomplicated.

Compensation and Benefits:

• The range for base pay is $130,000 - $150,000 which is dependent on level of experience, performance and choice of stock option compensation
• Employee stock options based on experience level
• Comprehensive health benefits, including Lifestyle Spending Account
• Four weeks of paid vacation per year
• Work anywhere in the world for 60 days of the year