Engineering & Architecture Lead

About Us:At Everly, our vision is to change the paradigm of insurance. We know life insurance can be confusing and complex. We know that most people purchase life insurance at a milestone moment and file it away for the future. We want to change how people think about, buy, and use life insurance by being a partner in life's journey. We are focused on making things that matter, making meaningful connections, and making things work WAY better. Our goal is to provide radically transparent, consumer-first insurance solutions. We are looking for people with a continuous improvement mindset. Those who think the opposite of "This is how we've always done it". We want people on our team who are always asking "How can we do this better?" Our company values are a guide to our behavior and help inform our decisions. We want people who embody those values of breaking down barriers, owning the outcome, embracing the journey, and sparking joy. This is a remote position based in the US with occasional travel. About the role:We are seeking a hands-on Engineering and Architecture Lead to drive the design, development, and delivery of our next-generation AI-powered insurance solutions. This role is ideal for a technology leader who is equally comfortable defining enterprise architecture strategy, building scalable systems and driving engineering excellence across platforms and solutions.You'll lead by example — setting engineering standards, designing cloud-native architectures, and providing hands-on guidance to engineering teams across web, data, AI, and application domains. Your mission: enable intelligent automation, seamless digital experiences, and data-driven decisioning that transform how insurance is delivered.You will lead a small and efficient cross-functional engineering team, and collaborate closely with product, operations, infrastructure and security leaders to deliver robust and innovative technology solutions. This role will report to the Head of Technology at Everly. What You'll Do:AI-Assisted Development & Engineering Excellence • Champion AI-assisted development across the engineering team — evaluating, adopting, and standardizing tools like GitHub, Claude, and LLM-based code review assistants to accelerate delivery and reduce toil. • Establish AI-augmented engineering workflows: integrate AI tooling into code generation, automated testing, documentation, code review, and incident triage pipelines. • Define guardrails and governance for AI-assisted development — including prompt standards, output review checkpoints, IP/security policies, and quality benchmarks for AI-generated code. • Cultivate a "human-in-the-loop" engineering culture where developers leverage AI as a productivity multiplier while maintaining strong ownership, code literacy, and judgment. • Continuously benchmark and evolve the AI toolchain, tracking improvements in developer velocity, defect rates, and time-to-production as measurable engineering KPIs.Architecture & Technical Leadership • Define and maintain enterprise architecture standards and reference architectures. • Govern solution design reviews, ensuring scalability, security, and maintainability. • Lead and mentor the engineering team to deliver high-quality, resilient solutions. • Drive engineering best practices including DevOps, CI/CD, cloud-native development, test automation, and AI enablement. • Lead by doing: design, develop, and review performant, secure code using modern tech stacks. • Oversee emerging technology evaluations for architectural and business fit. • Chair the Architecture Review Board (ARB) and technology governance forums.Cross-Functional Collaboration & Compliance • Collaborate with external partners to ensure technical feasibility and optimized delivery. • Ensure compliance with data privacy, cybersecurity, and regulatory requirements (GDPR, SOC2, etc.), including emerging AI governance standards. • Balance innovation and execution, with a strong bias for measurable business outcomes. • Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Skills and Experience: • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. • 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years in architectural leadership. • Demonstrated hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude or similar) and a track record of driving adoption across engineering teams. • Experience designing and enforcing AI coding governance frameworks — including policies for AI-generated code review, security scanning, and quality assurance. • Background in Insurtech, FinTech, or regulated financial services preferred. • Experience delivering scalable direct-to-consumer insurance platforms and AI-driven personalization systems. • Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS/Azure), container orchestration, microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and serverless architectures. • Hands-on understanding of CI/CD,