Senior Software Engineer

Hello, we’re Laka

You might not have heard of us yet – that’s OK, you’ve found us now – come and find out more about our journey…

Founded in 2017, Laka set out to transform insurance by connecting passionate cyclists to form a collective and protect their bikes for when things go wrong – a better model for insurance was born. For once people come first in insurance by fairly sharing the cost amongst each other. We exist to rewrite the rules of insurance so it’s something people stand with, not against.

Our model: Laka makes sure everything runs smoothly for The Collective – from exceptionally fast claims, splitting the cost fairly, guaranteeing a maximum price and all the other heavy lifting of a regulated insurance business. For that service, the collective pays Laka a fee relative to the claims in a month.

Take a closer look at exactly what this means and how it works here.

What have we been up to since then…?

In a nutshell, we’ve been very busy! Here are a few of the massive achievements we’ve had:

Raised an awesome Series A investment round of over $20m

Grown the team to over 60 Lakanauts, based across the UK and NL, enabling a choice-based, remote-first way of working

Launched Laka in multiple European countries, essentially helping more people in more places!

Captured the UK and NL enthusiast cyclist market and expanded into commercial business partnering

Been awarded ‘Best Cycle Insurance Provider’ (for the past 6 years in a row – go us! )

Opened 3 shiny new offices in London, Bristol & Amsterdam to provide spaces for people to collaborate as they like

Help us continue to change an outdated industry…

We’re growing real fast on our path to make the Laka collective model the industry standard and we’re expanding across segments, products, and territories. We’re looking for innovative, bold and brave minds to help us build the world’s best insurance company.

The role

Engineering at Laka

Our Engineering team are at the heart of how Laka’s platform is built and operated – their mission being to fix, build and grow. The current team is made up of 12 superstars working in squads in fortnightly sprints, and as Laka continues to expand and pace, we need to add more firepower to the party!

We’re searching for passionate and capable engineers who want to work on something that’s more than ‘just another app’. We’re changing the way things are done, and the way people feel about insurance – through a team of great people coming together to build great software.

We don’t expect you to know everything when you join (or ever, in fact) – we encourage you to learn as you go, through training and mentoring, so you can develop existing skills and learn new ones.

We’re a small, remote-first, team, if you come to work with us then the role will grow with and around your experience, personal goals and professional development.

Our full-stack includes: Node.js, Golang, MySQL, React, Redux, GraphQL (Apollo), gRPC (protobufs), ActiveMQ, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, MongoDB, and Redis.

What you’ll be getting up to:

• Helping us build out our microservices platform, delivering a unique insurance model to cyclists across Europe
• Building REST APIs for our partners
• Building cloud app/services using a modern tech stack built using JavaScript, GoLang, with a SQL database, and hosted on AWS via Kubernetes.
• Building out our React UIs, which includes internal and external applications.
• Working collaboratively with other teams within Laka – helping to problem solve, providing excellent support and solutions, and overall contributing to the continued success of the business. We work closely with product owners who help us shape our roadmap and direction.

You’ll be successful by:

• Delivering good quality code contributions
• Having excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Championing user empathy – you know what it takes to build great UX
• Working as part of a squad, and taking part in our agile ceremonies, peer reviews and pair programming

Location: we’re remote-first, so we’re happy for this role to be based anywhere in the UK, with occasional travel to our London or Bristol offices.

This role will be a great fit if you:

• Have commercial experience with backend development. We work with Node.js and Golang
• Have commercial experience working with a modern frontend framework – we use React, Next.js and Redux
• Are comfortable with REST APIs as well as Graphql
• Are comfortable with SQL
• You know why testing matters, and you have experience of unit testing and end-to-end testing. We use Jest and Cypress.
• Are a good communicator and team player – great pairing is a must for us
• Feel comfortable with a strong culture of mutual support and feedback
• Are keen to learn new things and recognise when it’s time to use the ‘best tools for the job’ rather than trying to ‘make things fit’
• Are comfortable working within a remote-first team. We have offices in Bristol, London & Amsterdam if you fancy popping in

Before you apply, please make sure that you currently have the right to work in the UK (we’re really sorry, but we’re not able to provide visa sponsorship for this role).

Our perks

Salary range: circa £70,000

 Remote-first way of working – you choose whether you work from home or our beautiful offices in London & Bristol (we have no minimum expectation of how many days you come in, although we’d love to see your friendly face!)

 Share options – we want you to be rewarded for Laka’s success – everyone in the business is granted share options when they join

Company bonus scheme – if the company hits its targets, you’ll get an annual cash bonus

Annual leave – 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays), with the option to roll over up to 5 days per year

Pension scheme – Laka pays 3% of your base salary into your pension to help you save for the future

Private medical insurance – we’ll give you individual private cover, with the option to add partners & dependants too (at a small cost)

 Home set-up allowance – in addition to letting you choose the kit you want (MacBook or Windows laptop, plus additional equipment like screens, keyboard, etc), we’ll also give you a one-off budget of £200 to get anything else you want in order to make your homeworking environment a comfortable place to be

Weekly lunch on us – £15 every Wednesday to enjoy lunch on Laka – pop out locally with people in the office, or order-in at home, the choice is yours

Company-wide events – we love getting everyone together as much as possible – expect regular events throughout the year, for team building, bonding, and general good old-fashioned fun!

Monthly socials – as if quarterly company events weren’t enough, we also give each office a budget for a monthly social activity (think anything from low-key dinner & drinks through to adventure golf, paddleboarding, bowling, electric darts, trampoline parks and more!)

 Laka swag – we’ll give you some lovely Laka kit to get you started, including a jumper & t-shirts so you can feel (& look) like part of the family

Laka credit – for all you cyclists, we’ll give you £10 credit per month towards insuring your bike(s) with us – plus give you access to a bunch of cycling industry discounts

Mental health support – unlimited support via Spill, including one-to-one therapy sessions

Belonging at Laka

We’re committed to building and sustaining a business that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging – our customer collective is broad and inclusive, and we’d like our own people to be too. We’re fast becoming a global community of people and we believe each person’s unique qualities should be celebrated as they are a huge part of what makes Laka a great place to be. We’d love you to bring your authentic self to work every single day, no matter your age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, caring responsibilities, neurodiversity, or anything else that makes you, you. If you’d like to request a reasonable adjustment as part of our application or assessment process, please let us know by emailing support@laka.co.uk.