Senior Mobile Engineer

The company

At Santam Switch, we are putting digital insurance in the hands of consumers. We are the only digital insurer in South Africa offering on-demand cover for your prized portables e.g. phones, laptops, bicycles, etc. We also offer on-demand car insurance that saves you money when you’re not driving your car. We are still at the beginning of our journey to redefine personal insurance for the 21st century and make short-term insurance simpler, easier and more affordable.

Santam Switch comprises a team of dynamic, talented and experienced technology, marketing and insurance professionals from diverse backgrounds. Santam Switch is part of the Santam Group. Santam is the leading short-term insurer in South Africa with a market share of more than 22%. Santam provides a diverse range of insurance products and services in Southern Africa and internationally through a network of 2,700 intermediaries and direct channels.
 

The role

We are looking for a Senior Mobile Engineer to lead the design, development and maintenance of the Android and IOS mobile apps. Your ultimate goal is to ensure we utilise the latest trends and technologies in mobile engineering to continuously improve our mobile apps. You enjoy moving fluidly between design, development, testing debugging, performance optimization, and leading complex technical projects from start to finish. You will report to the Head of Technology and work daily with a squad of designers, engineers and testers.

You will be part of an Engineering team that will be growing to 14 team members by 2024. You’ll work closely with the other parts of the business (actuarial, marketing, operations and product) and the rest of the Engineering team, to deliver on our technology goals.

The team

The Engineering team builds and operates a modern, cloud-first digital insurance platform at the core of Santam Switch. The team owns the business layer, insurance engine and APIs that power our mobile app and partner integrations. The Engineering team has five main functional areas/disciplines:

• Platform Engineering: Builds the insurance platform at the core of Santam Switch.
• Cloud Engineering: Builds the core cloud infrastructure that underlies our platform.
• Mobile Engineering: Builds Android and IOS mobile apps using React, Swift and Kotlin.
• Quality Assurance: Responsible for quality across the entire platform.
• IT Operations: Responsible for ensuring the smooth and secure operation of IT services.

The development philosophy

We follow Agile software development best practices and deliver software in Sprints. We believe in an iterative, design-thinking approach to product development and delivery. We automate what we can, keep meetings to a minimum, and have a continuous focus on quality and customer-centricit

The culture

In short: We take responsibility for deliverables and treat each other with respect. We are building a business where the following are valued:

• Take ownership, be accountable
• Reasoned argument
• Respect
• Foster the team’s growth and have fun
• Leadership is a role, not a rank
   

The environment and benefits

• Start-up environment within a leading insurance corporate.
• Market-related compensation.
• State-of-the-art hardware to work on (e.g. Macbook Pro).
• Training resources.
• Remote-first.
• Access to co-share offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town that allow us to connect in person and ideate around a whiteboard.
• Flexible working hours.
• Generous leave to balance your work and life.
• Group benefits (life insurance, disability insurance, etc.).
   

Responsibilities

Improve the quality of our applications.

• You will own the key performance indicators of the mobile apps and drive their visibility and use to continuously improve our architecture and processes.
• This can mean: paying down technical debt, rearchitecting old design decisions, and improving performance and resilience.

Extend the applications.

• Working closely with the Product team, you will build new capabilities for the applications that empower our users.
• You will lead the mobile architecture design and decision-making for your area of applications.

Improve our team.

• You will share your experience and knowledge.
• You will improve our documentation, and document your design decisions and rationale.
• You will mentor your fellow engineers.

Our ideal candidate

• 5+ years of software development experience (e.g. Software Engineer).
• Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience with cloud services. We use Amazon Web Services for all our infrastructure and service needs so relevant experience with AWS is a bonus, but experience with any of the major cloud providers is welcome.
• Good software development skills. Experience with any high-level programming language is a must. Most of our applications are built with React, JavaScript, Kotlin (Android), and Objective-C (IOS) so you would be expected to become productive in those languages.
• Experience in Insurance or Financial Services is advantageous.
• Experience in a start-up environment is advantageous.