Engineering at Newfront

As an engineer at Newfront, you'll work with world-class engineers from places like Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Uber who are eager to help and share their expertise. But you'll interact with members of other teams every day who directly impact the product we’re building.

You'll collaborate with deeply experienced insurance specialists (both brokers and account managers). As our key business stakeholders, it’s crucial we listen to their feedback around two major products: our client dashboard and account management platform. Understanding the human needs behind a product helps us engineer the best solutions.

In addition to ideation and feedback on our software, we share learnings with both technical and non-technical team members – including Newfront’s operational team in growth and marketing – to ensure our products are continuously improving and that as many people as possible get to use our work.

As a distributed company, we foster social interaction across departments through company-wide events and with the Donut app for Slack, which pairs teammates who don't usually work together to set up a virtual coffee or donut break. It’s optional, but a great way to get to know your teammates in a less formal setting. We’re also active on Slack and Zoom so everyone can stay in the loop.

Every engineer is expected to own the full lifecycle of their product: to ask users questions, design the product, build it, test it, incorporate feedback, ship it, and maintain it over time.

We cultivate a strong “owner mentality” throughout the company. As one of many examples, one of our engineers has a background in mathematics and analytics and just volunteered to own analytics for the organization. She considered it a rare opportunity to get to own an entire engineering function for a high-growth company. In order to succeed, she regularly talks to stakeholders across departments, triages their needs and opportunities, and designs a program for data-informed decision-making throughout the company. She ensures each of her stakeholders gets the data they need in a format they can use. She continuously incorporates feedback, fixes what's broken, and plans for future expansion.

Though we expect product ownership, you’ll never have to go it alone. We're extremely collaborative and helpful to one another, and we strive to ensure that no one team member is ever stuck as the only knowledge holder on a given piece of code. And of course, we want you to thrive: Wherever possible, we encourage people to volunteer for assignments where they believe they can contribute the most value.

If you ask any member of our team what makes Newfront unique, the first thing you’ll hear about is our culture.

We’ve built a team of people who are empathetic and supportive. Having empathy enables us to deeply understand the needs of our customers, who vary widely across a number of demographics. After all, it doesn’t matter how good of a coder you are if you can’t hear your customer’s needs.

Emotional intelligence is modeled from the top down at Newfront. You’ll never hear “that’s not my job” no matter how high you go. As an example, our co-founder and CTO held office hours to help anyone in the company troubleshoot two-factor authentication setup. Simply put, we do what needs to be done to grow our business and we keep our egos in check along the way.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about working at Newfront is that each day, we show up to redesign an entrenched, archaic industry.

We’re revolutionizing insurance in a variety of ways, but arguably the biggest change is in client service – and that’s where you come in.

One of our primary products is an account management platform that helps our account managers accomplish their work far more efficiently than would be possible at other brokerages. Our client dashboard automates routine transactions, so our customers are able to self-serve many common requests like finding evidence of their insurance coverage. And by using our broker dashboard, Newfront brokers can easily understand what’s happening with their clients without having to call or email them.

By leveraging forward-thinking technology and always talking to our customers, we’re fundamentally changing the experience of insurance for users of all kinds. We currently serve over 10,000 clients, and place more than $2 billion in premiums annually. The pandemic hasn’t slowed us down either and we were actually able to bring on some of our biggest brokers remotely. And in even more exciting news, we recently merged with ABD Insurance, putting our valuation at $1.35B. Learn more about how we’re continuing to lead the revolution to digitize insurance here.

Our mission is to transform risk into opportunity for our clients.

Thousands of clients, from tech unicorns to construction companies, depend on Newfront to run their businesses.

The product team at Newfront works directly with brokers and account managers to build the operating system for the brokerage, whether prospecting for clients, onboarding them to Newfront, or servicing their accounts. We also have an entire team dedicated just to broker happiness, and that team aggregates broker feedback and collaborates with engineering to drive product direction.

We feel lucky to sit in the same room as our end users solving real customer problems in a live operational environment. If you ship something in the morning, you might walk down the hall and see someone using your software later that afternoon (or discussing it in a beta channel on Slack).

Data improves the insurance experience for our brokers and clients.

By running a full-stack brokerage, we sit in a privileged position to analyze data. We collect structured information about risk from clients (e.g. property data, business metrics, etc.) and risk pricing data from insurance markets. This industry is particularly opaque and we have a rare opportunity to provide transparency and build the first ever multi-sided marketplace for risk.

There are lots of thorny technical problems to solve at Newfront, from workflow systems to data modeling, to document generation. We always rely on the data we collect from brokers and clients to inform new projects and test initiatives before release.

Several engineers on our team have backgrounds in data analysis and mathematics, and we encourage the entire team to leverage their expertise when shipping products.

Inherent in our collaborative nature is both giving and receiving feedback continuously.

You’ll never be in the dark about how you’re doing. All engineers have weekly 1:1 meetings with their manager, and everyone has the opportunity to give regular feedback to managers and senior staff.

Even as we've grown (and more recently made the shift to being fully remote), we’ve all taken time to pause and help each other out with constructive criticism and guidance. We pride ourselves on having an engineering team that is both focused and fully engaged, and we emphasize giving and accepting feedback with grace and maturity. That combination empowers the rest of the team to go forth and do their best work.

Newfront’s vision is to create the greatest brokerage in the world for our brokers and customers, and the technology required to get there isn’t built neatly.

Our industry is incredibly complicated and opaque. To break through, we need to innovate and make mistakes.

We want developers who bring an inherent curiosity to everything they do and a desire to try new things. We value enthusiasm and smart engineering more than expertise in a particular stack. Some of our most talented engineers have mastered programming languages while on the job.

Following major projects, we conduct thorough post-mortems where everyone is encouraged to contribute. You’ll never hear blame in these meetings. We take shared responsibility for mistakes and a collaborative approach to fixing them. If you try something and fail, we’ll share learnings together and choose a different strategy next time.