Head of Engineering

At Open, we exist because we believe that insurance does not have to be seen as complicated or costly. We’re an AI-powered platform transforming insurance globally — making it more transparent, cost-effective, and customer friendly. Since launching in 2016, we’ve grown into a certified B Corporation, operating across ANZ and the UK, and building modern infrastructure that brings wonder into insurance.

Engineering is how we earn the trust of our partners and customers, and where we turn Open’s strategy into shipped product. This is a rare opportunity to lead engineering at a scaling AI-native insurer: setting the technical direction across product, data and user experience, driving an AI-first engineering culture in which humans and AI agents build together, and laying the technical foundations for Open’s growth from an ANZ-rooted business into an established player in the UK and EU market.

What you’ll do

You’ll lead engineering for our application, data and user-experience platforms. Reporting to the Chief Technology & AI Officer and a peer to TechOps, Solution Architecture and Product, you’ll lead three engineering leaders and their teams of ~25+ engineers, data engineers and AI technicians across AU and UK as we scale from ANZ into the UK and EU.

This is a hands-on role. You’ll be close to the work — in design reviews, pull requests and incident calls, coaching tech leads and unblocking squads. The lift is operational as much as strategic.

You’ll be measured on driving up three things across the function:

Execution excellence

• Cut cycle time from idea to production, quarter on quarter, by using the best of modern software delivery and agentic development.
• Anticipate engineering requirements early in partner onboarding and new-geography launches.
• Translate Product priorities into a clear engineering roadmap, with sequencing and trade-offs made transparent.

AI-native ways of working

• Make AI agents a first-class part of how Engineering works - pair every engineer with agents for design, code, review, test and ops, and set the bar for how fast a small team can ship.
• Own Open’s agentic product capability end-to-end: with Product, ship AI agents for sales, claims and support that build on the Insurance Companion foundation.
• Build the evaluations, guardrails and human-in-the-loop patterns that let us deploy GenAI safely in a regulated industry.

Platform resilience

• Hold squads to account for the full lifecycle of what they ship - design, build, run, measure, improve - not just the merge.
• Own availability, incident response and engineering health across the application, data and UX platforms.
• Work hand-in-hand with TechOps, Solution Architecture and InfoSec on reliability, security and governance - including the foundations for multi-region growth.

Who this role isn’t for

This is a broad engineering leadership role in a lean, high-trust environment. It rewards people who are energised by ownership, ambiguity and agentic leverage, not those looking for a defined lane or a large organisation to lead.

Specifically, it’s probably not the right fit if:

• You’re coming from a 200+ engineer organisation and expecting a similar layer cake of managers, programme managers and platform teams: this role is much closer to the work, by design.
• You’re a hands-off architect or pure people manager: technical credibility with builders is essential here, and you’ll still read pull requests and step into design reviews.
• You see AI as autocomplete: this role is for someone who has already restructured how a team works around agents, not someone who plans to “start exploring” GenAI.
• You’re motivated primarily by growing a very large team: the function is intentionally lean and high-leverage, and we expect agentic tooling to keep it that way.
• You want a purely advisory remit. This role owns delivery outcomes: what ships, when and at what quality; not just recommendations.

What you’ll bring

Required

• 10+ years in engineering, with 5+ years leading leaders - you’ve run multi-team engineering organisations and managed managers as well as senior individual contributors.
• A track record of scaling teams through the 20 → 50+ transition, with quality and shipping velocity intact.
• Genuinely AI-native as a leader - you’ve built and shipped agentic systems in production, use AI agents in your own work every day, and have restructured how a team works around human + agent collaboration. You have an opinion on which problems agents should own end-to-end versus assist on.
• Strong technical credibility - confident in Python and modern AWS, comfortable with cloud-native data warehousing (Snowflake or comparable). You can still read a pull request and ask the right question.
• Architectural judgment for scale - you’ve made the call on when to decompose a monolith, when to leave well alone, and how to introduce loose coupling pragmatically.
• Modern delivery practices - you’ve led teams through the move to trunk-based development and stronger CI/CD, and know how to make this stick culturally, not just technically.
• Comfortable operating collaboratively alongside peer leaders in TechOps, Solution Architecture, Product and InfoSec — effective without direct authority over those functions.
• Confident communicator from engineer to senior stakeholder — you translate gnarly technical problems into plain English and steer non-technical colleagues towards the right call.
• Mentor and multiplier - you’ve grown senior engineers into tech leads and tech leads into managers; people seek you out for guidance.
• Bias for action - you spot issues early, fix root causes and keep pushing for simpler, faster, safer ways of working.

Preferred

• Experience operating across multiple geographies (ANZ and UK, or equivalent), including the data-residency and in-country considerations of regulated financial services.
• Exposure to the insurance, fintech, or regulated financial services sector.
• Experience building configurable or no-code product platforms (embedded insurance, white-label sales flows, partner-driven experiences).
• Experience scaling frontend, data and AI/ML engineering in parallel as internal services.
• Familiarity with AI safety practices — evaluations, red-teaming, guardrails, human-in-the-loop.
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.

Role location

Where you’ll work

This role is based in Sydney, Australia. We work in a hybrid model, with teams in the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We’ve found this rhythm genuinely supports collaboration and the kind of fast, high-trust culture we’ve built. You’ll have flexibility on the other days to work in a way that suits you.

Why Open?

Open is on a mission to make it easy for everyone to get the most from their insurance. Insurance is one of the world’s least digitally mature industries - for years it’s remained confusing, paper-based and heavily intermediated. We launched in 2016 to build a global, AI-powered platform that digitises the entire insurance process, making it transparent, less costly and more reliable.

It’s an exciting time to join Open and be part of a tech scale-up. We provide our team with:

• Highly competitive compensation, including share options - we believe in paying people what they’re worth and having everyone in our company share in our success.
• High levels of autonomy and trust so you can do your best work.
• Growth opportunities internally - as you grow, your role can too.
• Flexible working - we are about impact, not time at your desk.
• We encourage freedom and responsibility, including the ability to work from anywhere.
• Paid company parental leave, supporting all parents as they balance career and family.
• Bonus leave - additional paid leave designed to support rest and wellbeing once standard leave has been utilised.
• Personal development allowance — flexible annual benefit to support learning, wellbeing and personal growth.

More about us

Open is a certified B Corporation using business as a force for good, and we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building an inclusive, high-performing team.

We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement - we’re looking for people who are curious, courageous, innovative, and motivated by impact.

If you want to help build the future of insurance, we’d love to hear from you.

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Sydney NSW