Software Engineer - Backend

About Annex

We’re solving a critical problem for the American homeowner - the exploding cost of homeowners insurance - specifically, for consumers in natural catastrophe heavy areas. From south Texas to woodland California to the Jersey shore, consumers are being asked to pay thousands more in insurance premiums every year.

For decades, the insurance industry has met the needs of these consumers with a transaction based in PDFs and faxes, and underwriting based on anecdote and human experience. Risk isn’t priced accurately, the sale is high friction and confusing, and those who bear the risk have lost money hand over fist. This is a $30b TAM space where software can create massive value across multiple dimensions; we at Annex are building a platform connecting the dots between what’s best for consumers, insurance agents and reinsurers.

Our progress

• Bootstrapped our way to market and to revenue in a highly regulated vertical.
• Secured a partnership with a carrier in the most difficult market conditions in decades, based on a perspective on how to leverage technology in our space
• Closed a seed round in March 2024
• Formed partnerships with top-tier insurance retail partners; adding thousands of insurance agents in the coming months which will drive significant revenue growth
• Launched a new residential flood insurance offering in Q2 2024

What have we built

• Web-based sales tooling that can quote and issue a policy within 90 seconds
• Direct integration with underwriting teams at Lloyd’s of London focused on natural catastrophe risk
• Orchestration middleware that drives the full policy lifecycle: quote, issue, endorse, cancel, reinstate, and renewal
• A prospective quote API that allows us to deliver offers into digital insurance marketplaces and affinity distribution channels
• Array of internal tools automating several dozen business-critical tasks legacy players solve for with headcount and paper

What is on our roadmap

• Augment our core platform to integrate with additional carrier partners enabling us to provide more/better options and products for consumers
• Develop a pricing engine and infrastructure that allows us to launch our own custom homeowners insurance products, manage portfolio concentration, and update rates in real-time
• Add improvements to the Annex portal and API infrastructure enabling agents and consumers to self-serve or work with us via API in novel ways, unlocking differentiated distribution and efficiency gains

Who we think this is a great role for

• An experienced product-minded engineer looking to be a founding backend engineer at a post-PMF, post-revenue startup
• A person with an interest in the intersection of climate and financial services. Our platform saves consumers thousands of dollars, or provides options where there are none

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Experience with SQL and relational databases
• Experience desiging, building and maintaining components of a larger system

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience with Scala strongly preferred; alternatively, candidates highly experienced in another functional programming language would be strongly considered
• Experience in fintech or insurtech