Lead Software Engineer

Who We Are

Nirvana is on a mission to harness the power of data to revolutionize commercial insurance and enable a safer world. We are bringing much-needed innovation into the legacy, trillion-dollar commercial insurance industry. We have developed cutting-edge predictive models that use real-time IoT data from billions of connected devices, allowing us to better understand and price risk. Our AI-driven platform fundamentally changes the way an insurance company operates with personalized risk scoring, faster underwriting, modernized claims, and proactive, data-driven insights to help customers prevent accidents.

We’ve already proven the scale—reaching well over $100 million in premiums and more than doubling year over year. Our data moat is growing exponentially with more than 20 billion miles of telematics data, leading to more predictive models and new insights into how we can better understand and reduce risk. Altogether, our loss ratio, efficiency, and customer experience are redefining what can be done in the industry.

With $170+ million raised, including an industry-leading Series C round in January 2025, we’re only accelerating our growth, with strong support from top-tier VCs including Lightspeed, General Catalyst, and Valor. Nirvana’s leadership team has previously helped scale multi-billion-dollar companies from scratch, including Samsara, Rubrik, and Flexport, and includes industry veterans from Hiscox, The Hartford, and RLI.

About the Role

As a Lead Software Engineer at Nirvana, you will,

• Own and build the product: You will take ownership of key parts of the product, and drive it end-to-end working closely with our founding team and customer design partners. 

• Build team and culture: At Nirvana, we believe that culture is the secret sauce in building a great engineering team. You will build and embody this culture - and set the bar high as we build the company.

Here are some of the components you will work on as we take the product to market.

• Core Data Platform: Support ingestion and real-time analysis for billions of data points, including geospatial data, driving quality indicators from sensors and dashcam feeds, and vehicle health data from auto sensors. Architect this generically to support multiple data sources and account for differences among them. Ensure data quality control by design.

• Risk and Underwriting Engine: Build a data-driven risk engine to dynamically price premiums based on heterogeneous data types. Build a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to allow underwriters and actuaries to create and rapidly iterate on models. Use cutting-edge explainable ML to improve model performance and mine predictive signals. 

• Safety First Insurance Platform: Build the industry’s first consumer quality insurance platform focused on safety. Help prevent accidents by engaging customers and actively supporting them on their safety journey. Bring a product-focused approach and consumer-grade tech to a big legacy market.

About You

• You are an owner. You are comfortable owning large parts of our product and driving the development and roadmap.

• You ship. You get satisfaction from getting your features into customers' hands in a short period of time. You take accountability for the end-to-end product experience of your features, warts and all.

• You are a craftsman. You care deeply about delivering high-quality experiences and approach development with a high degree of craft. You are passionate about tooling and developer productivity.

• You like simplicity. You often find the simplest way of achieving something. You care about the long-term readability and maintainability of your codebase.

• You are a lifelong learner. You learn quickly and can operate independently. You're not afraid to take something on just because you don’t know how to do it yet.

• You value clear, open communication. You not only have the ability or skill to communicate effectively but also have the willingness to be open and honest in your communication. You demonstrate these abilities through thoughtful code reviews, honest and kind feedback, and documentation.

Requirements

• You have 8+ years of experience writing backend services in statically typed languages like Golang/Scala/Java/C++, and a willingness to dive into stateful services.

• You like being a generalist. If we do our jobs well, you will spend more of your time building systems than fighting fires, so you should enjoy wearing many hats and working on many parts of the system.

• You can break up a complex system into clean reusable components, and design interfaces and abstractions given the way you expect internal and external users to consume them.

What you’ll get from us

• Competitive compensation & meaningful equity

• Medical insurance

• Monthly stipend for anything that gives you joy

• Hybrid culture and reimbursement for home office equipment

• A flexible vacation policy and a team that understands building a company is a marathon, not a sprint

• A culture that gives you the autonomy you need to do great work, and the transparency you need to make good decisions

• #LI-Hybrid