Engineering Lead (Player-Coach) (Node.js/React/AI)

TL;DR

Engineering Lead (Player-Coach) (Node.js/React/AI): Leading a product engineering team building and operating embedded insurance platform capabilities with an accent on technical quality, delivery ownership, and AI-assisted engineering. Focus on designing distributed systems and APIs, improving production resilience, coaching engineers, and establishing responsible workflows for coding agents.

Location: Hybrid in Brussels, with up to three remote days per week; remote work from anywhere is available for one month per year.

Company

hirify.global is a European insurtech providing embedded insurance experiences through partners including Revolut, Mastercard, BMW, and Monzo.

What you will do

• Lead a product engineering team as a technically engaged people leader and player-coach.
• Own delivery from discovery and technical design through implementation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product and Design on scope, sequencing, requirements, usability, and technical trade-offs.
• Maintain standards for code quality, testing, security, privacy, observability, release readiness, and maintainability.
• Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems while driving structural improvements to recurring technical debt.
• Introduce responsible AI-assisted engineering practices, including coding-agent workflows, guardrails, human review, and outcome measurement.

Requirements

• Typically 7+ years of professional experience building and operating production systems.
• Hands-on technical leadership experience with modern software ecosystems; hirify.global primarily uses TypeScript, Node.js, React, and MongoDB.
• Experience with distributed systems, service boundaries, RESTful APIs, third-party integrations, data consistency, Git, CI/CD, and automated deployments.
• Experience with cloud environments, preferably GCP, plus operational practices including observability, release readiness, and incident response.
• Direct experience managing, coaching, and developing engineers, including feedback and performance conversations.
• Hands-on use of coding agents and AI tools with accountability for security, testing, human review, and responsible adoption.

Nice to have

• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Background in insurance, fintech, or another regulated and operationally complex domain.
• Experience with Java, C#, Go, or Python and the ability to become effective in a new stack quickly.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid work with up to three remote days per week and one month of work-from-anywhere eligibility per year.
• 28 days off, including eight additional days beyond the 20 legal days.
• hirify.global-dedicated workspace at WeWork on Rue du Commerce 31 in Brussels.
• Collaborative, inclusive culture with regular social events and opportunities for knowledge sharing.
• Opportunity to work among entrepreneurial people and contribute to a fast-growing European insurtech.