WorldCover is looking for a Full Stack Engineer in New York City to help us fulfill our mission to protect a billion small businesses around the world with insurance against natural disasters.
Over $100 billion is lost to natural catastrophes in developing countries every year. Less than 1% is insured. With an innovative funding platform that attracts profit-seeking investment capital to this problem, WorldCover is helping individuals, households, and small businesses that operate in challenging environments transfer their climate change risk.
The opportunity
As our first full-time engineering hire, you’ll work directly with the CEO/CTO to build product, evolve our technical vision, and craft our infrastructure. You should be able to confidently help us make key architecture choices that will impact the company for the long term. We are focused on building now, but we’re growing fast and there will be the potential to lead our engineering team in the future.
Our current stack consists of:
- internal web tools built with react / redux
- node.js backend
- open source JSON database (though we’d like to migrate to MongoDB or a robust relational database)
- hosting on Azure cloud (to take advantage of $500k credits)
- Twilio integration
- third-party Android application (Fulcrum) with JSON API
- R and Python codebase for data research and pricing algorithms;
If these excite you, that's great. Otherwise things are early enough that we'd be happy to hear about a new direction that you prefer.
In the past six months we’ve built a system to track thousands of customers, payments, and sales team activities. Our agents collect field data through a third-party Android application—optimized for offline data collection and easy form building—which is linked by a JSON API to our backend data warehouse. We integrate with Twilio to send automated voice and text messages to customers and work with several third party API providers to process mobile money payments.
Your first core responsibility will be to integrate these solutions into a stable end-to-end infrastructure that allows us to seamlessly acquire and service hundreds of thousands of customers in Ghana.
Technical challenge
You will have the opportunity to tackle technical challenges that are unique to our markets:
- processing 100,000’s of mobile money payments across several mobile money platforms
- monitoring thousands of small insurance contracts representing millions of $ of coverage
- using machine learning on unstructured geospatial and socioeconomic datasets to improve sales process and product performance
You'll be building across a variety of needs, from customer-facing messaging platforms and apps, to back-end data warehouse design, to mobile payments processing.
Our company
WorldCover is a for-profit, high-growth startup founded by Chris Sheehan and Shiliang Tang, MIT graduates with backgrounds in computer science and finance in NYC. We graduated from Y Combinator in 2016 (Techcrunch; YC) and raised a large seed round from a group of investors including Index Ventures, Greylock, Venrock, Fintech Collective, Semil Shah (Haystack), and others.
We have significant traction, selling crop insurance to over 10,000 customers in Africa backed by funds from a $10B institutional investor. Our growing team in Ghana includes 10 salaried and 15+ local sales staff.
Our culture promotes experimentation, data collection and measurement, and open transparent discussions. We are fast-moving yet deliberate and goal-oriented; and we strive to communicate a consistent and clear vision across our entire company. You’ll have opportunities for flexible hours and international travel.
The ideal candidate will have:
- 3-5 years of experience developing software across the stack
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science
- Experience in an early role at a tech startup, and/or
- Experience at a more mature tech company with reputation for quality engineering
Additionally valuable are:
- Demonstrated ability to grow and lead a team
- Experience working with money; e.g. in a fintech startup or financial services firm
- Interest in emerging markets and social entrepreneurship
Competitive salary and equity in a growing, early stage, well-funded company
Opportunities for international travel
Direct impact across hundreds of thousands of individuals affected by climate change