Engineering Manager

ABOUT BESTOW Life insurance is one of the world's most important products. It's also one of the hardest to build, distribute, and modernize. Bestow exists to change that. Bestow is a leading vertical technology platform serving some of the largest and most innovative life insurers. Our platform unifies the fragmented, legacy value chain, enabling carriers to launch products in weeks instead of years. Carriers choose us to scale and operate at unprecedented speed, powered by AI and automation. Bestow isn't selling policies. We're building the infrastructure that helps an entire industry move faster, reach more people, and deliver on its promise. Backed by leading investors (Goldman Sachs, Hedosophia, NEA, Valar, 8VC) and trusted by major carriers, Bestow is powered by a team that moves with precision, purpose, and heart. If you want to help reimagine a centuries-old industry with lasting impact, join us. Bestow offers flexible remote/hybrid work, meaningful benefits, equity, and substantial growth opportunities. Bestow uses E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit E-Verify.gov http://e-verify.gov. ABOUT THE TEAM Bestow is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead a platform configuration and implementation team. The Engineering team is the core of Bestow, driving all technology for our SaaS platform that empowers life insurance carriers. We build and operate the systems that serve our enterprise carrier partners across the entire lifecycle of a life insurance policy, our consumers, and our employees. Engineering partners closely with Product Management, Experience Design, and Delivery Management to define and prioritize the roadmap and to hold our commitments to carrier partners and to the business. Our primary technologies are a microservices architecture in Golang, Python, and TypeScript on PostgreSQL, integrated over gRPC, REST, and asynchronous messaging, with event sourcing in our configuration and domain layers. We deploy and operate on Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform. This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is open to Remote (US). #LI-REMOTE WHAT YOU'LL DO Bestow is looking for an Engineering Manager to contribute in the following ways: • Lead your team's technical direction. Work with your team's senior and staff engineers to shape the design of the services you own across the configuration layer, the enrollment workflow engine, and the event-sourced domain services. Keep them scalable, reliable, secure, and performant, and make sure your roadmap ladders up to the broader platform strategy. • Favor repeatability and platform over bespoke work. Steer your team toward configuration-driven solutions so that each new carrier implementation costs less and ships faster than the last. • Collaborate beyond your reporting line. Partner with your two peer Engineering Managers and with teams outside IPC to deliver work that spans team boundaries. Clarify ownership of shared interfaces early, and escalate to your leadership when ambiguity threatens a date or becomes an incident. • Own your team's delivery commitments. Be accountable for what your team commits to carrier partners, including UAT handoff dates, and report status accurately and early to leadership. • Develop requirements early. Partner with Product, Delivery Management, Underwriting, and Compliance to surface missing requirements and cross-team dependencies during discovery, when a gap costs a conversation rather than a release. • Use data and metrics. Track delivery, quality, and system health for your team, and use that data to make technical and staffing decisions. Balance near-term commitments against long-term maintainability and security. • Grow your engineers. Run a healthy 1:1 and feedback cadence, set clear expectations against the career ladder, and write calibrated performance reviews. Build personalized growth plans, address individual or team challenges promptly, and develop senior engineers toward staff and tech lead roles. Keep knowledge spread across the team so a single departure does not put a partner commitment at risk. • Own hiring for your team. Act as hiring manager for your open requisitions, partner closely with recruiting, and raise the bar with every hire. Manage contractor and vendor partners as part of one team, with the same expectations and quality bar as full-time engineers. • Make the team faster. Run lightweight processes and ceremonies that help your team ship, and drop the ones that do not. Foster a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous learning alongside our Principal engineers and other engineering leaders. • Put AI to work in how your team builds. Lead adoption of AI development tooling (Claude Code, Claude Tag, GitHub Copilot) and AI-first delivery practices such as AIDLC, and measure whether they are producing real leverage. Hold AI-generated code to standards that reduce technical debt, and coach engineers against the AI competencies in our career ladders. • Expand what AI tooling you can safely use. Work with Security, IT, and Compliance to propose compensating controls rather than stopping at a blocked request. Turn recurring questions from Product, Design, and new engineers into durable, self-serve knowledge. • Stay hands-on to be credible. Join design and architecture reviews, review code when it matters, and stay current on emerging technologies and what belongs on our platform. Occasionally ship some software! WHO YOU ARE • A technical, people-first engineering leader. You are comfortable owning outcomes for your own team while collaborating with peers and partners across Bestow. You understand distributed systems, you can hold a firm line on quality in a regulated domain, and you are energized by growing engineers. • Experienced engineering manager. Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. Typically 6+ years of professional software development experience and 2+ years of engineering management experience, or equivalent experience leading a team of software engineers. You will lead a team of 6 to 10 engineers. • Solid in distributed systems. Proven ability to design, build, and operate distributed systems and microservices architectures, including event-driven and event-sourced designs. • Fluent in our stack. Golang and/or Python backend services, API design over gRPC and REST, asynchronous messaging patterns, and strong PostgreSQL experience covering schema design, data modeling, and query performance. Cloud platform experience, with a preference for Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes. • An advocate for agentic engineering. You have introduced AI development tools into a team's daily workflow and can point to measurable results. • Experienced across the full lifecycle. Strong grounding in design, planning, delivery, continuous delivery, release strategy, monitoring, and continuous improvement. • Credible across boundaries you do not own. You can reason about the frontend composition layer, data platform, and infrastructure well enough to negotiate interfaces and resolve cross-team issues without escalating everything. • Able to go deep when it matters. You can read and contribute to your team's codebase and engage credibly in architectural decisions. • Serious about testing. An advocate for automated testing and test-driven development, with real opinions on how to test configuration and rules at scale. • Organized under competing priorities. You define and track key metrics, hold your team accountable, and consistently meet committed dates and SLAs. • A builder of teams. Proven ability to hire, mentor, and retain engineers, including growing senior engineers into technical leaders. • A clear communicator. Excellent written and verbal communication. You can explain a complex system and its trade-offs to an executive, a carrier partner, and an engineer on the same day. • Desirable, not required. Life insurance, annuities, or another regulated-industry background is a strong plus, as is experience delivering implementations for enterprise or carrier partners under contractual dates. • The ideal candidate is a technical, inspiring leader who can hold two things at once: a partner implementation that has to ship on a contractual date, and a platform that has to get easier to configure every quarter. They are as comfortable in an architecture review as in a 1:1, and their team gets better because they lead it. TOTAL REWARDS At Bestow, we’re proud to be awarded for our team members, innovative products, and culture. Our standard benefits for full-time employees include: - Competitive salary and equity based on role - Policies and managers that support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave programs - 100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance - Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing - Flexible work-from-home policy and open to remote - Remote and WFH options, as well as a beautiful, state-of-the-art office in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, for those who prefer an office setting - Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives Recent Employer Awards include: - Best Place for Working Parents 2023 + 2024 + 2025 - Great Place to Work Certified, 2022 + 2023 + 2024 + 2025 - Built In Best Places to Work, 2022 + 2023 + 2025 - Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Texas 2022 + 2023 - Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Financial Services and Insurance 2022 + 2023 + 2024 We value diversity at Bestow. The company will hire, recruit, and promote regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, pregnancy or maternity, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We understand the importance of creating a safe and comfortable work environment and encourage individualism and authenticity in every team member. Thanks for considering a job at Bestow!