Principal Product Manager, Underwriting

About the role

The Underwriting Engine is the most consequential system at Ethos. It determines who gets covered, at what price, and how fast — at scale, with accuracy that directly affects real families and carrier partners. Getting it right is as much a product problem as a technical one.

We're looking for a Principal PM to own this platform through deep individual contribution. You'll set strategy and drive execution for the Underwriting Engine, including its rules infrastructure, knowledge graph, and workbench tooling, and work closely with Actuarial, Underwriting, Finance, and senior leadership across the US, Singapore, and India.

There are no direct reports. This role is designed for someone who wants to go deep, not manage up. Your leverage comes from the quality of your thinking, the clarity of your communication, and your ability to move complex, high-stakes work forward entirely through influence. If you're energized by owning hard problems end-to-end without organizational scaffolding, this is the role.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Underwriting Engine:

• Rules Engine Own the decisioning rules infrastructure: how eligibility, pricing, and risk criteria are expressed, maintained, and updated at speed.
• Knowledge Graph Drive product strategy for how risk knowledge is structured, enriched, and made available to decisioning systems.
• Workbench Own the internal tooling that allows Actuarial and Underwriting teams to configure, test, and deploy decisioning changes safely.

Roadmap & Stakeholder Alignment:

• Long-term roadmap Collaborate with Actuarial, Underwriting, Finance, and senior leadership to build and maintain a shared roadmap that serves end customers, the business, carrier partners, and internal users.
• AI/ML innovation Champion and drive a compliant AI/ML roadmap for underwriting, identifying where models improve accuracy, speed, and coverage, and working with data science and engineering to ship it.
• Protect families. Deliver accurate decisions. — The underwriting engine determines who gets life insurance and at what terms. Accuracy, fairness, and speed are product outcomes, not just engineering metrics. You'll own that accountability directly, as an individual.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Deep individual operator You don't manage people you manage complexity. You're happiest when you're the one writing the PRD, running the stakeholder review, and driving the decision. You get things done through influence, rigor, and trust, not org structure.
• Platform-to-business translation You can walk into a conversation with a senior actuary and understand their constraints, then turn around and write a crisp product brief for engineering. You make complex technical systems legible to business stakeholders and vice versa, without losing fidelity in either direction.
• Data-informed decision making Comfortable in data-heavy environments where decisions have real downstream consequences. You know how to design experiments, read model outputs critically, and use data to prioritize ruthlessly without outsourcing judgment to dashboards.
• Structured communicator Your written and spoken communication is precise and concise. You can write a strategy doc that earns alignment across Actuarial, Engineering, and Finance without three rounds of revision — and present confidently to senior leadership across time zones without losing the room.
• Impact-driven prioritisation You have a strong filter for what matters. In a domain with near-infinite complexity, you consistently identify the highest-leverage investments and protect your own focus from everything else. You're comfortable saying no — and you say it with clear reasoning.
• Technical complexity without fear Rules engines, knowledge graphs, ML pipelines, decisioning systems — you've worked with systems of comparable complexity before. You don't need to be an engineer, but you need to be technically credible enough to make good build-vs-buy calls, spot architectural risks early, and earn respect from a strong engineering team.
• Proven track record in adjacent regulated domains Insurance experience is welcome but not required. We're looking for candidates who have built data-heavy decisioning or intelligence platforms at the intersection of compliance and regulation in credit, fraud, healthcare, risk, or similar fast-paced environments. What matters is the pattern: complex domain, high-stakes decisions, structured data at scale.

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