Tech Lead, Core (Remote First)

at  Zensurance

Zensurance is a scale-up InsurTech company that is re-imagining the commercial insurance market. At Zensurance, we want to empower small businesses across Canada to thrive by offering an honest, simplified, and modern approach to insurance. Our main recipe is a combination of modern technology and insurance industry expertise powered by our talented team members.
Being a technology-forward company, we utilize various tools and platforms to create fun, engaging and meaningful work experiences for our employees, as a remote-first company.
We are boldly going where no insurance broker has gone before!
Our Core team is responsible for the engine driving the company’s key goals such as adding more relevant insurance products with great prices on our website and delivering relevant insurance documents to our customers with ease.
As a Tech Lead, you will utilize your extensive technical expertise to steer the Engineering Team’s technical direction, aligning it with our culture of iterative, autonomous development and deployment. Your primary focus will be on addressing security and scalability considerations, collaborating closely with the Product Manager, Team Lead, Engineering, and Staff Developers to devise and implement systems and processes that enable the team to achieve its goals.
As a senior member of the team, you can elaborate your thoughts without difficulty and are capable of discussing complex ideas in a logical way. You manage your time well to meet important deadlines while supporting other team members who need to be mentored.
Reporting to the Team Lead, Engineering, you will design and implement solutions in both the front-end application and back-end APIs.
This is a remote-first role within the GTA. #LI-Remote

REQUIREMENTS

• University degree or college diploma in a recognized technical, vocational or academic program or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years of experience building rich, complex and scalable APIs, including integration with third party APIs.
• 5+ years of building front-end web applications using modern Javascript frameworks.
• 2+ experience in designing scalable and distributed systems.
• Experience mentoring other developers.
• Extensive full-stack experience working with React/Redux/Node/Typescript/MongoDB and Javascript.
• Extensive experience with the Scrum framework and Agile methodologies.
• Familiarity with DORA metrics to measure the DevOps Performance and experience in communicating what’s been measured with the team.
• Experience architecting and augmenting large software systems.
• Experience with Javascript development toolings like WebPack, Babel, and Storybook.
• Experience with Unit Testing frameworks like Jest/Mocha.
• Experience building and/or working with micro-services and micro front-ends.

WHO WE ARE. WHAT WE’RE BUILDING.

Business is hard work, insurance doesn’t have to be!
At Zensurance we believe that teamwork makes the dream work.
We are passionate about providing business owners with the best insurance solutions at great rates through an online and easy-to-use platform.
Our secret sauce is all about our culture. Here at Zensurance our culture is built on four core values that we live and breathe daily. They are:
INTEGRITY: We do what’s right.
INCLUDE: We are an open and safe space for all.
INVENT: We take an innovative approach to creating straightforward solutions for our customers.
DELIVER: We set ambitious goals and hold ourselves accountable for achieving them.
Zensurance celebrates diversity in its workforce structure and encourages applications from all backgrounds.
Zensurance is an inclusive employer that celebrates diversity in its workforce structure. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates and will accommodate applicants’ needs under the respective provincial human rights codes throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process. Please advise the recruiter if you require accommodation; to ensure your accessibility needs are accommodated throughout this process. Information received relating to accommodation will be addressed confidentially.
We understand that looking for a new exciting opportunity can be time-consuming. We truly appreciate your time in going through the job posting and applying for a position with us

• Collaborate with project stakeholders and the development team to design, build, and implement scalable, user-friendly apps and libraries using Node, React, and Typescript.
• Collaborate with Product Management to examine, adjust, and break down roadmap items into epics and break down epics into discreet, actionable, appropriately sized tickets in the team’s backlog.
• Provide a technical perspective on organizational objectives within the team’s scope of activities. Analyze requirements, identify areas of concern, and provide recommendations based on your extensive technical background.
• Using POC models provided by Staff Developers, design and implement systems and infrastructure in accordance with the team’s vision and culture.
• Adhere to the organization’s security strategy using a security-first mindset.
• Discuss various strategies and architecture and highlight tradeoffs for potential solutions.
• Perform code reviews, ensuring that pull requests accurately reflect the acceptance criteria of the tickets they address.
• Use quality metrics to identify gaps in the testing strategy.
• Work with teams to recommend solutions that are in accordance with accepted testing frameworks.
• Manage and optimize the integration of third-party systems into our infrastructure while ensuring the reliability, performance, and security of these systems. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to identify integration needs, implement solutions, and monitor system performance to guarantee uninterrupted service delivery.
• Define and prioritize areas of technical debt and bugs, taking into consideration outcomes of the incident management process and addressing them with the team.
• Foster a culture of iterative deployability with awareness of cycle time and failure rates.
• Coach and mentor the development team and work to expand their technical knowledge and skills.
• Use a systematic approach to debugging to diagnose issues within the application.
• Write unit tests as well as higher-level tests to ensure application quality and stability.
• Consistently produce production-ready code that is easily testable, easily understandable, and accounts for edge cases and errors, using comments and other documentation strategies where appropriate.
• Follow Agile practices, suggest improvements, and participate in team events.
• Develop a strong understanding of the company’s goals and initiatives and help the engineering team deliver on those goals/initiatives.
• Ensure technical standards such as accessibility, performance, security, maintainability, functional correctness, operability and observability are observed in the modules developed and maintained by the team.
• Document decisions, research and guides to foster and build a culture of continuous learning and continuous improvement.
• Perform other duties as assigned.