Lead Full-Stack Engineer

About Insurance Insider

Insurance Insider is the leading provider of insights and analysis for the world's top insurers, distributors, service providers, and investors.

Since 1996, we've been helping clients uncover new business opportunities and protect against risks through our exclusive news, deep analysis and actionable insights on the insurance market. Our coverage extends across the London market, global (re)insurance market, insurance-linked securities market and US property and casualty market.

About the Role

We are looking for a senior or Lead Full-Stack Engineer who writes excellent code, ships robust production systems, and takes ownership of features from data layer to API to delivery.
You will be deeply comfortable across Node.js and TypeScript, ideally with Python or Java in your toolkit, and you’ll lead by example on engineering quality.
This is also a people-leadership role: you’ll line-manage and mentor a small team of developers, set technical direction, and raise the bar for how the group builds.
Above all, you believe the future of software is changing – that the best engineers now orchestrate AI coding agents rather than typing every line themselves – and you want to help build a team that works that way.
This is a hybrid role based in Sofia, working closely with product, editorial, and commercial teams, communicating complex technical topics to non-technical stakeholders. You’ll collaborate with other technical leaders and contribute to the technical decisions, system design, and best code and security practices established in the company.

Key Responsibilities

Full Stack Engineering & Delivery

• Design, build, and ship production services and APIs end-to-end using Node.js and TypeScript (and Python where it’s the right tool) – owning architecture, code quality, testing, and deployment.
• Write clean, well-structured, maintainable code across the stack – backend services, data models, integrations, and the interfaces that sit on top of them – and hold the team to the same standard through review and pairing.
  
  

Backend, Data & Integrations

• Build and maintain robust backend services, data models, and integrations – connecting content and structured data to power search, tagging, and intelligence features across our platform.
• Identify new data sources and third-party APIs; scope their integration; and build the connectors, services, and webhooks needed to operationalise them – quickly and reliably.
• Integrate 3rd party systems, tools and applications, supporting the business's operational needs.
  
  

AI-Native & Agentic Development

• Use AI coding agents – Claude Code, Cursor, or similar – as a core part of how you build, effectively “managing” agents to plan, write, debug, and refactor code at high velocity while keeping quality high.
• Champion agent-driven workflows across the team – establishing best practices, guardrails, and review processes so the whole group ships faster and better with AI, not just you.
• Build working prototypes for AI-based products and internal AI tools and stay curious about where the tooling is heading.
  
  

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Work across teams – product, editorial, commercial, and leadership – to understand needs, shape requirements, and deliver the right solutions at the right time.
• Communicate technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to non-technical audiences, making complex work accessible and actionable.
  
  

Operational Excellence

• Own quality and reliability across the systems your team builds – monitoring, alerting, and proactively fixing issues to keep services dependable in production.
• Continuously improve engineering processes, tooling, and documentation so that the team’s codebase is scalable, maintainable, and easy to build on.

Technical Leadership & People Management

• Line manage, mentor, and grow a small team of developers – running 1:1s, supporting career development, giving clear feedback, and helping the team do the best work of their careers.
• Set technical direction and standards – making sound architectural decisions, defining how the team works, and balancing speed of delivery against long-term maintainability.

Required Experience

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript (and ideally Python or Java) – writing production-quality code across the stack.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or similar – and a genuine conviction that orchestrating these agents is the future of how great software gets built.
• Proven experience building and running production services and APIs – with a solid grasp of databases, integrations, testing, and deployment.
• A strong engineering foundation combined with a generalist, full-stack mindset – able to move across backend, data, and integration work and make sound technical decisions independently.
• Experience managing or leading people or teams – whether as a line manager, tech lead, or team lead – with a track record of mentoring developers and raising the standard of work around you.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• A degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field – or demonstrably equivalent experience. We care more about the quality of your engineering than where you studied.
• Experience with cloud platforms and modern delivery practices (CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure as code); confident building REST APIs, webhook consumers, or event-driven services in Node.js or Python.
• A point of view on how AI agents reshape team workflows, hiring, and what “senior engineering” means – and ideas about how to build a team that thrives in that world.

What We Offer

• Flexibility with true hybrid working – expected to be in the office 1-2 days a week.

• 25 holiday days per year, plus your birthday off.

• A collaborative and mission-driven culture.

• Opportunities for professional growth and development.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package.