Engineering Manager - Customer and Claims

ABOUT HOMEPROTECT

Cover for Almost every Home

We founded Homeprotect on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. Since 2002, we've been combining smart technology with real human expertise to protect hundreds of thousands of unique homes across the UK, and we're just getting started.

If you're someone who loves solving interesting problems, taking ownership and working with a team that aims high, speaks up and lifts each other, Homeprotect is a place where you can do meaningful work, grow your career and make a real difference for our customers.

What It's Like to Work Here

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our people. We're a small but perfectly formed team of insurance specialists, technologists, data scientists and customer champions - all bringing individual expertise, an appetite for innovation and a shared ambition to protect the homes and things people love.

We work at pace, but we trust our people to work in a way that brings out their best. You'll collaborate closely across teams, have real ownership from day one and see the impact you have first-hand with flexible working to help you balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life.

We've been recognised as a Great Place to Work UK for seven consecutive years - most recently ranked 29th nationally, jumping 71 places in a single year.

ROLE PURPOSE

Customer Experience and Operations owns the customer's whole relationship with Homeprotect: everything a customer touches, and everything our people use to help them. From the customer's point of view, it is one story:

• Finding us and buying: our connections to price comparison websites, the quote and buy journey, and the customer portal.

• Living with their policy: self-service policy changes, renewals, documents and the messages we send them.

• Getting help when they need it: telephony, webchat, case management, and the workspace our agents use every day.

• Making a claim: reporting it online, assessment, settlement and payments, our connections to the supplier network, and the tools our claims handlers rely on.

• Keeping it fair and consistent: fraud management, complaints, a single view of the customer, and the design system that makes every journey look and feel like Homeprotect.

The engineering challenge is to make all of this feel like one experience, even though it runs on many different systems.

We're looking for a product-minded Engineering Manager to lead this area. You'll build and grow a high-performing engineering team across multiple squads, partner with the area's Product Managers, and make sure the team ships often, safely and with high standards of craft.

Rather than delivering projects from a shared backlog, you'll lead long-lived product engineering squads responsible for the reliability, evolution and technical health of this area. You'll create the environment where engineers can do their best work while balancing short-term delivery with long-term sustainability.

Success in this role means customers get a simple, consistent experience whether they are buying, managing their policy or making a claim, our people have reliable tools that help them, and the systems behind it all are owned, understood and easy to change.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Team Leadership & People Development

• Build, lead and grow a healthy, high-performing engineering team across several squads, through effective hiring, coaching, mentoring and performance management.

• Create a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration and continuous learning.

• Develop engineers through regular feedback, career development and technical coaching, and grow the next generation of technical leads.

• Foster psychological safety while maintaining high standards of engineering excellence.

• Build an engineering culture aligned with Homeprotect's Engineering Excellence Framework, encouraging technical quality, product thinking, delivery excellence and continuous improvement.

• Create clarity around goals, expectations and success measures, so each squad knows what it owns and why it matters.

• Own the engineering strategy, delivery and operational health of Customer Experience and Operations, from customer-facing journeys to the systems our people use behind the scenes.

• Define and evolve the technical roadmap, balancing business priorities with long-term sustainability and scalability.

• Lead the shift from configured vendor platforms to owned, engineered products: clear integration services, testable logic, and good data quality.

• Make pragmatic build, buy or integrate decisions with the Product Managers, based on cost, speed, control and long-term flexibility.

• Keep the customer-facing experience fast, accessible and consistent, and grow the design system as a shared product other teams build on.

• Support controlled experiments on customer journeys, with the tracking and data the Product Managers need to trust the results.

• Deliver predictably and often, while maintaining high standards of quality, resilience and operational excellence.

• Drive continuous improvement in engineering metrics including deployment frequency, lead time, reliability, change failure rate and operational excellence.

• Lead incident response and post-incident learning for systems owned by the team. Many of them are used live by agents and claims handlers, so reliability has a direct impact on customers.

• Champion AI-assisted development across the team, and work with the AI team so that AI capabilities in claims and customer service are well integrated, reliable and built on clean data.

• Partner closely with the Product Managers to define priorities, roadmaps and measurable outcomes, keeping the customer's journey joined up across the whole area.

• Own the domain backlogs jointly with the Product Managers: prioritisation and grooming are a shared activity, not something the team receives as tickets from Product.

• Work closely with Claims and Customer Service leaders to understand how their teams work and where our systems slow them down.

• Work closely with Marketing and Commercial teams on acquisition and conversion.

• Work with Underwriting & Pricing, Policy Administration and Finance teams, whose core platforms the customer journeys are built on.

• Manage the technical side of key vendor and partner relationships, so their platforms fit our architecture rather than shape it.

• Build trusted relationships across Technology and the wider business, helping stakeholders understand engineering trade-offs and shaping pragmatic solutions.

• Contribute to organisation-wide engineering standards, platform improvements and architectural direction beyond your own area.

• Create an environment where engineers consistently deliver high-quality software, continuously improve their craft and take ownership of business outcomes.

• Encourage experimentation, learning and pragmatic decision-making while maintaining the operational discipline expected of systems customers and colleagues rely on every day.

• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce technical debt and remove fragile, hard-to-change configuration.

• Help shape Homeprotect's engineering standards, tooling, observability and platform capabilities as the organisation continues its product engineering transformation.

• Promote modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, observability and secure software development.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

Essential

• A solid track record leading engineering teams with accountability for people, delivery, technical health and operational excellence, ideally across more than one squad.

• Strong technical background with the ability to engage deeply on architecture and software design, across both customer-facing applications and backend services.

• Experience integrating with and taking ownership of third-party platforms (for example customer relationship, workflow, telephony or claims platforms), and making sound build, buy or integrate decisions.

• Hands-on understanding of modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing and cloud-native development.

• Experience operating production systems requiring high availability, performance and resilience.

• Experience leading long-lived product engineering teams with ownership of a business capability rather than delivering project-based work.

• Experience partnering closely with Product Managers to balance customer value, engineering investment and delivery priorities.

• Hands-on with AI-assisted engineering tools, and able to help a team adopt them well.

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with non-engineering stakeholders such as Operations, Claims, Marketing or Commercial teams.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence stakeholders across both business and technology.

• Experience within General Insurance or another highly regulated industry.

• Experience building digital customer journeys at scale, including experimentation and conversion work.

• Experience with Salesforce or a similar customer relationship platform, or with a claims administration platform.

• Experience integrating AI capabilities into operational or customer service systems.

• Experience with design systems and accessibility standards.

• Experience leading organisations through the transition from project-based delivery to domain-oriented product teams.

• Experience with Kubernetes, Azure and cloud-native engineering practices.

BENEFITS

We want you to feel rewarded, supported and set up to thrive throughout your career with us.

Learning and Growth: We invest in your development through structured learning, mentoring, buddying, on-the-job experience and cross-functional projects. We support role-relevant professional qualifications where they'll make the biggest difference, and our Lunch and Learn sessions to help you stay connected to what’s going on right across the business.

Health and Wellbeing: Your wellbeing matters here. We offer private healthcare through BUPA, an Employee Assistance Programme covering legal, financial and counselling support for you, a Wellbeing Centre with online tools and resources, regular wellbeing seminars and workshops, annual flu jabs and an annual eye care voucher.

Financial Security and Reward: We offer an annual discretionary bonus scheme upto 30% of your base pay, life insurance at four times your salary, and a pension with Aegon. You'll also receive a significant discount on Homeprotect home insurance - with a friends and family discount too, and a staff referral bonus when someone you recommend joins the team.

Time Off: 25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to five additional days each year.

Genuine Flexible Working We trust our people to work in a way that best suits them - with flexible working to balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life. We ask that everyone comes into the office at least once a week, as we believe in-person connection is important for collaboration, culture and building great relationships. You'll receive a homeworking starter kit from day one and can claim towards additional home office equipment within your first six months.

Purpose and Community: We care about more than just the work. Through our charity partnership with Refuge, the UK's largest specialist domestic abuse charity and regular social, wellbeing and charitable events throughout the year, there are plenty of ways to connect, give back and feel part of something bigger.

UNIQUE AS STANDARD

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. We believe in celebrating difference - everything that makes both our customers and our people unique. We consider visa sponsorship on a case by case basis for the right candidate, so please don't let that stop you from applying.

We encourage you to let us know if you need any extra help with your application or have any requirements at any stage of the recruitment journey, we want the process to work for you.

Your data will be maintained in line with our recruitment data privacy policy.

Regulatory Responsibilities

As an FCA regulated insurer, doing the right thing isn't a compliance requirement - it's simply how we work. All colleagues are expected to uphold the FCA Individual Conduct Rules (1–6) and act with integrity, due skill and care, openness with regulators and a genuine commitment to delivering good outcomes for our customers.

You'll work within approved processes and authority limits, keep accurate and auditable records, protect data under UK GDPR and our information security policies, escalate risks and exceptions promptly, report incidents, breaches and any financial crime or sanctions concerns (including via whistleblowing), support vulnerable customers with reasonable adjustments, and complete all mandatory training to maintain competence.

If the role falls within SM&CR, a supplementary document outlining the key regulatory responsibilities will be provided.