Senior Software Engineer - Applications

Full-time · Engineering · San Francisco, CA (3 days/week in office) or Nashville, TN (Remote)

A frontend engineer to own the web experience every customer, broker, auditor and administrator uses to manage Meanwhile's financial products.

We're seeking a Senior Applications Engineer to own the web experience of the Meanwhile platform. Everyone who touches our products works through it, and they are not one audience: direct policyholders managing their own coverage, third-party brokers administering books of business, the clients of those brokers, auditors reviewing our records, and internal administrators operating the platform. Each persona sees different data, holds different permissions, and needs a different surface - built on one coherent application.

This is a frontend-focused role on a small, high-impact engineering team. You'll own how these experiences are designed, built, and shipped: the component architecture, the state and data-fetching patterns, the performance and accessibility bar, and the design system that keeps five audiences from turning into five codebases. You'll work close to the backend and go into it when the work calls for it, but the center of gravity is the web application.

We have a unique engineering model where each engineer owns a product area end-to-end, from conception to production. This is an opportunity to have the autonomy of a founder with the backing of an established financial services company.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship the web experiences that customers, brokers, broker clients, auditors, and administrators use to manage financial products
• Own the frontend architecture: component design, routing and rendering strategy, state management, data fetching, auth and permission boundaries across personas
• Design and maintain a shared design system and component library that serves multiple audiences without fragmenting
• Hold the bar on performance, accessibility, and responsive behavior - these are consumer-grade products in a regulated industry
• Partner closely with non-technical subject matter experts in insurance and finance to translate complex domain requirements into interfaces people can actually use
• Write production code primarily in TypeScript/React/Next.js, reaching into the Python backend when the feature requires it
• Leverage AI tools and modern development practices to accelerate delivery
• Participate in business-hours on-call rotation shared across the product engineering team (no nights/weekends)
• Make critical product and technical decisions with minimal oversight, teaching yourself new domains as needed

Qualifications

Required

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• Deep frontend experience in JavaScript and TypeScript, with production experience in Next.js
• Strong command of modern React - component architecture, rendering and data-fetching patterns, state management at scale
• Track record of independently delivering complex features with minimal guidance
• Experience leveraging AI tools (Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) to accelerate development
• Exceptional communication skills - ability to work directly with non-technical domain experts and translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Self-directed learner who can navigate ambiguity and teach themselves new domains
• Low-ego approach with flexibility to work across the entire stack
• Based in the SF Bay Area with the ability to work in-office 3 days per week, or based in Nashville, TN (remote)

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience building consumer-facing (B2C) products, where design quality and usability directly drive adoption
• Experience with multi-tenant or multi-persona applications - role-based access, delegated administration, white-labeled or partner-facing portals
• Previous experience in fintech, insurance, or other regulated industries
• Interest in or experience with cryptocurrency/blockchain technologies
• Experience owning a design system or component library used by multiple teams
• Startup experience, especially in small engineering teams (<10 people)

Technical Environment

• Frontend: Next.js, React/TypeScript
• Backend: Python
• Database: PostgreSQL
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Cloud: AWS

Why Join Us?

• True Ownership: Own the entire web surface of the platform with full autonomy over technical and product decisions
• Unique Domain: Build first-of-their-kind Bitcoin-denominated financial products
• High Impact: Join a small engineering team where your work directly shapes the company
• Direct Influence: Flat organization with direct access to leadership and meaningful input on product strategy
• Growth Potential: As we scale, help define how application engineering evolves at the company
• Benefits:
  • Fully covered health, dental, and vision for you and your family
  • Meals provided in office
  • Two annual company off sites (fully paid)

Our Values

• Keep your word. Honor commitments to clients and each other.
• Build for the future. We measure success in decades; look ahead without losing sight of what matters today.
• Be curious. Our advantage is understanding the world, the market, and each other.
• Have fun. Enjoy the work. Find humor where you can. Rest when needed. Say when you need help.

How to Apply

Email careers@meanwhile.bm with your resume and the role you'd be interested in.

Company & Funding

We're building the world's largest long-term insurer, using digital money and AI to serve billions of people profitably. We want anyone, anywhere, to be able to save for their future, protect their family, and build wealth across generations.

We face a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a vertically integrated life (re)insurer. Our product offerings are globally unique, making it possible for us to scale our balance sheet, build modern systems from scratch, and then directly compete to win a market that is 3% of global GDP.

We've raised over $140M to date. Sam Altman and Lachy Groom led our initial raise, and they've since been joined by leading investors in AI, insurance, and Bitcoin, including Northwestern Mutual, Apollo, Bain Capital, Pantera, Haun, Framework, Fulgur Ventures, MS&AD, Mouro, Stillmark, and Wences Casares.

Our Bermuda operating subsidiary holds the the world's only license to issue life insurance denominated entirely in Bitcoin. It's also the only company in the world with audited financials stated in Bitcoin. (If you join us, you can expect to do a lot of things no one's ever done before.)

Engineering at Meanwhile

With the advent of ubiquitous AI tooling, the dynamic range in individual engineering effectiveness is only widening.

At Meanwhile, we're planning for a world in which small, tight-knit engineering teams (supported by a small, tight-knit platform team) own entire lines of business, and are compensated accordingly.

We're attacking a huge market with the leanest, most effective team in insurance. Where incumbents employ a thousand people, we think we can make it work with a hundred or a dozen.

We're looking for hungry ICs (and former managers who see the writing on the wall) interested in pushing the boundaries of engineering productivity in a vertically integrated, regulated organization.

We're growing quickly. You will fix million-dollar bugs.

On the business side, we hire for deep domain expertise, ambition, and the creativity to figure out the previously impossible. Because our engineers work closely with people from the business, they need curiosity, flexibility, an appetite for (and the ability to digest) complex context, and strong communication skills.

Our view is that ownership is taken, not given. You will be successful here if your work progressively builds others' trust in your ability to identify, attack, and solve larger and larger problems, including those that no one else has anticipated.

We believe that "code wins arguments," that prototyping is often the best first step in a design process, and that the impact of velocity is non-linear.

You are excited by putting up multiple meaningful changes, or writing thousands of lines of code, in a day (even though you know that deleting lines of code is more exciting than writing them, and that, occasionally, deep reflection is required in order to ship anything).

You aren't fazed by building systems that don't work out — sometimes, you have to throw code away.

Intellectual honesty is non-negotiable. You love to learn and to teach, to ask questions and to answer them, and to be transparent about your uncertainty.

You are eager to learn, with the rest of the team, how to work with AI tools, including agents, in order to move faster and ship better, more complete versions of your ideas. You will experiment with new ways of working, with the expectation that some of them will be unsuccessful, and you will teach others what works.

This is the most exciting time in decades to be a competent, technically ambitious engineer. We want to offer you the opportunity to see what's really possible and how much better you can get at your craft.