Openly is a technology-enabled premium insurance provider working with independent agents.
Kerry Czubko, Engineering Director, shares everything you need to know about their Engineering team!
In this Video
Kerry discusses:
- Who is Openly?
- Details on the Engineering team
- Interesting Projects & Unique Challenges
- Openly’s tech stack
- The interview process
- Why now is a good time to join
Video Transcript
Who is Openly?
So, Openly is a tech-forward homeowners insurance provider that sells premium coverage exclusively through independent agents, aiming to modernize a traditionally slow industry.
Details on the Engineering Team
So engineering is comprised of about 60 employees. We’re really split into two directorates. So there is the platform directorate, which is what I’m director over, and then there is the product directorate. So that consists of both of these directorates consist of claims, billing, we have insurance products supporting engineering teams, infrastructure, data engineering, UI, and then platform services.
Interesting Projects & Unique Challenges
So right now, we’re really we’re in a really unique position because we are right now we just do homeowners insurance and we are working on launching our second product, which is auto. So that’s really exciting while also continuing to grow our state footprint in home. So we’re currently in 24 states, and then Nevada and New Jersey are coming soon.
Openly’s Tech Stack
So right now our tech stack—the back end is Go, which is all of our core systems and APIs. Python is used for data management framework services and pipeline tooling. The front end is Vue for our web UIs along with Nuxt, HTML, CSS, and Tailwind. GCP, so Google, is our primary cloud provider. For data, we use BigQuery, Composer, Airflow, Aiven, Kafka, Apache Spark, and then when it comes to DevOps, that is CircleCI, Datadog, and Git for version control. So that kind of encompasses all of the technologies that we use in our stack.
The Interview Process
So the interview process for an engineer: first they talk with our technical recruiter to kind of talk about the role itself. How does it align to what that candidate is looking for? And then next, they talk to the hiring manager. So that would be two engineering managers. After that, they proceed on to the technical interviews. That would be two peers from the team that they would likely be joining. And then there’s a take-home technical challenge. And then after they complete that take-home technical challenge, they meet with two peers—likely the two peers that they already met with from the team—to kind of review the challenge and ask a few clarifying questions. And then after that, we would move to offer.
Why Now is a Good Time to Join
And I’m sure you hear this a lot, but it’s really the people. Everyone here is focused on the same shared goal. There are no egos. And I’m surrounded by a lot of really smart people, so I’m constantly learning every day. And one of our company values is curiosity. We encourage people and we welcome people to ask questions, to challenge norms. We hire people that are traditionally not from the insurance industry background because we recognize that they’re going to be questioning how things work, asking why, and that’s what we want. So, it’s that belief that diverse teams ship better products. Full stop.