Engineering Manager

Kin is redesigning insurance to be smarter, faster, and centered on the customer. We use intelligent pricing, offer seamless bundling, and make every step (from purchasing, servicing to claims) simple and friction-free, especially in the places traditional insurers often ignore.

We empower people to protect what matters most, starting with their homes and expanding to all they value, in a world where climate risks, rising costs, and outdated systems leave too many behind. Our approach has fostered amazing growth, attracted marquee investors, and earned us accolades, including being named to:

• Built In Chicago's Best Places to Work, Midsize Companies (2021-2025).

• Forbes' America's Best Startup Employers (2021- 2024, Ranked #37 in 2024).

• Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies.

• Forbes’ Fintech 50.

Simply put, our people are what make us great – we need forward-thinking, inspired game-changers like you to join us in our mission.

We are looking for a passionate, entrepreneurial, and hands-on Engineering Manager. You will guide a full-stack team across front-end and back-end systems to drive innovation in product development while improving performance, scalability, and maintainability. You should be comfortable working with distributed teams, confident in your leadership skills, and motivated by the challenge of owning technical delivery in a fast-paced environment.

As an Engineering Manager, you set the tone for how your team collaborates, grows, and delivers. We expect you to lead with empathy, clarity, and accountability. You’ll coach engineers through technical and professional development, foster a culture of high ownership, ensure predictable execution, and partner closely with product leaders to balance innovation with reliability. Leading by example, you must embody the behaviors we value: open communication, thoughtful decision-making, and an unwavering commitment to quality.

• Serving as a hands-on engineering leader and trusted technical expert

• Managing, mentoring and coaching a small team of talented engineers

• Collaborating closely with Product Management to define, refine, and maintain your team’s roadmap

• Driving your team to innovate while delivering roadmap features with agility and high quality

• Writing clean, maintainable, and efficient code

• Leading pair programming sessions and providing technical mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers

• Leading architectural and design discussions to ensure long-term maintainability, including:

  • Championing API-first development practices, ensuring services are designed through well-defined contracts before implementation

  • Guiding the team in breaking apart monolithic patterns and moving toward distributed, modular architectures

  • Overseeing the design and evolution of service boundaries, ensuring systems are loosely coupled and scalable

• Participating in agile ceremonies: daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives

• Collaborating with cross-functional partners across Product, PMO and other engineering teams

• Executing quickly and effectively to take ideas from concept to production

• Maintaining high availability and responding quickly to production incidents or outages

• Representing your team and product line in cross-functional discussions and planning sessions

• Participating in engineering recruiting, interviewing, and hiring processes
  

• 8+ years of hands-on software development experience with strong computer science fundamentals

• Proven leadership experience managing or leading a team of engineers

• Experience acting as a “player-coach” who contributes meaningfully to the codebase

• Strong experience building distributed systems and decomposing monoliths into services

• Hands-on experience with API-first design, including schema-first workflows (OpenAPI/Swagger), contract testing, and interface-driven development

• Experience with AWS cloud architecture, including lambdas, event-driven patterns, serverless databases, and IaC

• Ability to design systems with clear service ownership, reliability, and modularity

• Experience establishing best practices for distributed communication, observability, and error handling (e.g., tracing, retries, idempotency)

• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, message queues/brokers, and distributed system patterns

• Strong communication skills and the ability to convey complex technical or product concepts

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, iterative development environment

• Excellent command of the full SDLC: analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, and support

• Familiarity with modern JS frameworks (React, Angular, Vue)

• Experience with BI or big-data technologies such as Looker or BigTable

• Experience with Ruby on Rails or similar frameworks

• Exposure to regulated industries or financial/insurance products
  

Oh, and don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

We offer a comprehensive benefits program, allowing you to choose the

benefits that are best for you and your family including: Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Short and Long Term Disability Insurance options, Employee Assistance Program, as well as elective voluntary benefits such as accident insurance, hospital indemnity, critical illness, legal assistance and pet insurance. Kinfolk become eligible for benefits on the first day of the month following their start date.

In addition to these benefits, we also are excited to offer the following:

• Competitive salary and company equity through Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), granted as part of our standard compensation package and based on role and level.

• 401K with company match of up to 4% of eligible earnings

• Flexible PTO for exempt employees (employees typically take 15-20 days annually), along with 8 company-observed holidays

• A paid parental leave program that provides 100% salary continuation of up to 14 weeks for birthing parents and 8 weeks for non birthing parents

• Continuing education and professional development opportunities

#LI-REMOTE

For Sales Agents and Customer Service Agents: These roles sit in any of the following 30 states: AL, AZ, CO, FL, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MO, MT, NC, NE, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, and WI.

For all other positions, these roles can sit in any of the following 40 states: AL, AR, AZ, CA (exempt only), CO, CT, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, MT, NC, NE, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, and WI. Please only apply if you are able to live and work full-time in one of the states listed above.

State locations and specifics are subject to change as our hiring requirements shift.

Kin is the only pure-play, direct-to-consumer digital insurer focused on the growing home insurance market. We make policies convenient and affordable through a technology platform that delivers a seamless user experience, customized options for coverage, and fast, high-quality claims service. Kin is a fully licensed carrier that offers coverage through its reciprocal exchanges which are owned by its policyholders. To learn more, visit www.kin.com.

Kin is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We don't just accept difference – we honor it, nurture it, and celebrate it. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.