Founding Software Engineer

Join the rocket ship redefining commercial insurance with AI

nettle is a fast-growing, VC-backed Insurtech building one of the most compelling real-world applications of AI: transforming how commercial insurers assess risk - 5x faster, more consistently, and at a far greater scale than ever before

We have strong product-market fit and are scaling quickly

$2m pre-seed raised in 2025, with a significant seed round planned for Q1 2026

Six-figure annual revenue with seven figures in active pipeline

Insurtech of the Year 2025 (Finance Awards) and European Insurtech of the Year 2025 (Guidewire Awards)

Live production deployments with major global insurers

Founding team with experience from McKinsey, QuantumBlack, Meta, Slack ,and LinkedIn

About the Role

We're nettle, a VC-backed insurtech startup building AI-powered software that's transforming how commercial insurers assess risk. Risk engineers are the backbone of multi-million-dollar underwriting decisions, but they're drowning in manual processes. Our agentic platform cuts days of work down to minutes, supercharging teams to 5x their output. We're already live with major global insurers across Europe, the US, and the Middle East, and we need another exceptional engineer to help us deploy into some of the world's largest insurance organisations.

As a member of the founding team, you'll work directly with the founders and our engineering team across the full stack. This isn't a "build features in isolation" role. You'll ship AI-powered product, own enterprise deployments into client infrastructure, and sit at the boundary of engineering and customer delivery. Your day might go from pairing on an agentic workflow in the morning to debugging a DNS issue in a client's on-prem environment after lunch. You'll shape our technical foundation, engineering culture, and decision-making processes from the ground up.

What You'll Accomplish

• Ship AI features end-to-end, from prototype to production, working closely with founders and your favourite AI engineering tools
• Own enterprise deployments for global insurance clients, managing Docker-based infrastructure across multiple regions (US, UK, Europe, Middle East)
• Work directly with client IT and infosec teams to navigate security reviews, data residency requirements, and network configurations
• Drive critical technical decisions and establish development processes that 10x our output as a team
• Translate real customer feedback and field observations into product improvements, closing the loop between what users need and what we build
• Help grow the engineering team by shaping our hiring bar and interviewing candidates

What We're Looking For Must-haves

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong Python backend expertise (Flask/Django) and frontend skills (TypeScript/React/Next.js)
• Experience with on premise or hybrid enterprise deployments, not just cloud. You've shipped software into client infrastructure.
• Comfortable engaging with technical client stakeholders (IT, infosec, DevOps) and representing engineering in customer facing settings
• Hands on experience with Docker, networking, and infrastructure debugging in production environments
• Track record of building products from scratch and getting them into the hands of real users

Nice-to-haves

• Higher education (BSc, MSc, PhD) or research background
• Previous experience as an early engineer at a startup that scaled quickly
• Recent work involving LLM integrations or agentic workflows
• Knowledge of PostgreSQL, Redis, and database optimisation
• Open source contributions, technical blog posts, or talks

How We Work

We're a small team that operates with high trust and high ownership. We use AI tools daily to move faster than teams 5x our size. We'd rather ship something imperfect today than plan something perfect for next quarter. You'll be in the office 4 days a week at our Shoreditch space, working side by side with the people building the company.

Founding team equity stake in a category-defining, VC-backed startup

Top tier office in Shoreditch with great coffee, brand new gym, and generous perks

Weekly team lunches, learning budget, regular offsites, and full health and pension benefits

Interview Process

• Culture interview (30 min) - Chat with Jamie (Founding Software Engineer) or Julio (Chief of Staff) on values, working style, and how you'd contribute to the team
• Intro call (30 min) - Chat with Katya (CTO) to walk through the role, your background, and mutual fit
• Technical deep dive (60 min) - Conversation with Jamie (Founding Software Engineer) on system design, technical judgment, and real world problem solving
• Take home exercise - A short, practical task that mirrors the kind of work you'd actually do here
• Total estimated time commitment: 3h min