Bristol: Source

London: Source

About the job

👋🏻 Hello, we’re LakaYou 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 $13m

🚀 Grown the team to over 50 Lakanauts, based across the UK and NL, enabling a choice-based, remote-first way of working

🚀 Launched Laka in a total of 5 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 5 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

🚀 We’ve also achieved a 5* rating on Google Reviews and Glassdoor – go check us out!

Help us continue to change an outdated industry…We’re growing real fast on our path to make the Laka collective model the industry standard and we’re expanding across segments, products, and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 is at the heart of how Laka’s platform is built, operated, and reported – our mission being to fix, build and grow. The current team is made up of 14 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 a passionate and capable Data Engineer who wants to work on something that’s more than just another ETL system. 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 data warehouse is on Redshift, with our pipeline in SQL on Kleene, and our reporting and BI in Tableau.

Our full-stack includes: Postgres (and some residual mysql as we complete a transition), Node.js, Golang, React, Redux, GraphQL (Apollo), gRPC (protobufs), ActiveMQ, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, MongoDB, and Redis.

What you’ll be getting up to:

In your first week:

• Getting familiar with the data schemas used in our data warehouse, data pipeline, and production system
• Getting familiar with the system architecture of our data warehouse, data pipeline, and production system
• Shipping your first transform in the data pipeline, in postgres SQL
• Learning about the data needs of various parts of the business

In your first six months:

• Modelling and implementing new portions of the data warehouse based on business needs
• Contribute to the effort to improve automated testing and other related support infrastructure around the data pipeline and warehouse
• Build out infrastructure to meet the needs of our data reporting

In your first couple years and beyond:

• Contributing to data requirements in partner reporting and systems
• Building out our data pipeline as we productionize dynamic systems, including machine learning tools
• Ship data pipeline improvements to enable the above, in languages that better support those activities (such as python and/or scala)

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.Requirements👉🏻 This role will be a great fit if you:

• Have commercial experience with managing data in a DAG system such as Apache Airflow or similar (no need to have used Kleene before)
• You know why testing matters, and you have experience of unit testing and end-to-end testing
• 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’
• You’re 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).

Benefits

🌟 Our perksWhat can you expect from working at Laka?

🏠 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 a cash bonus of 5% of your base salary annually

🌴 Annual leave – 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays), plus an additional 3 days at Christmas, 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-shirt 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.