Staff Engineer II Telematics Platform

CURRENT ROOT EMPLOYEES - Please apply using the career page in Workday. This career site is for external applicants only.

Since 2015 Root has been on a mission to make lives better through better and more fair insurance. We’re doing this through a focus on an exceptional user experience, robust systems, and modern quantitative methods. We want to attract the best drivers and reward them with fair prices for the coverage they need that ensure profitability for the business.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Staff Engineer II to join our Telematics Platform team and lead engineering and telematics data science at Root. In this role, you will be responsible for guiding complex technical implementation with engineers on your team or aligned to your domain, supporting data science workflows and delivery, and working with a broad set of stakeholders to define the strategy and overall roadmap for the domain. As a Staff Engineer, you will be the primary technical leader for the telematics domain, helping us make decisions and deliver software with lasting effects on the order of quarters and years.

At Root we’ve built an end-to-end telematics solution with in-house data collection and scoring pipelines. Our data scientists leverage this system to build telematics based risk segmentation for pricing insurance using modern quantitative methods. This produces a best in class driving score that serves as a core component of our company strategy. We’re looking to accelerate our lead in this space by building upon our Telematics Platform to enable more flexibility, faster iteration, higher throughput, and better segmentation, all at a lower cost. You will help us achieve these goals as we look to further improve our telematics scoring capabilities while also building a best in class telematics product experience.

Root is a technology company revolutionizing personal insurance with a pricing model based upon fairness and a modern customer experience. Using the power of telematics, Root offers customers auto insurance based on how they drive, not based solely on their demographics. With its technology-forward products, Root is working to fundamentally change an industry for the better.

Root is a “work where it works best” company. Meaning we will support you working in whatever location that works best for you across the US. We will continue to have our headquarters in Columbus and offices in other locations to give more flexibility and more choice about how we live and work.

Salary Range: $180,000 - $229,000

How You Will Make an Impact

Partner with Product, Data Science, Analytics, and experts in the Insurance group to set the strategy for the quarters to come

Identify and socialize important technical initiatives that increase the effectiveness of our products, systems, and teams

Coach and guide engineers on your team in planning experiments and projects that align with our strategic objectives

Contribute code each development cycle to advance the impact of the team

Lead by example in incident response ensuring we take action to continuously improve the resiliency of our systems

Coordinate with Staff Engineers across the organization to establish and evangelize standards and best practices

What You Will Need to Succeed

7+ years as a software engineer

3+ years leading software teams

Expertise in Python

Expertise in Cloud Architecture

Familiarity with Ruby on Rails

Exposure to native app development

Experience with telematics or sensor data collection systems

Experience in ML development lifecycle and deployment

Proven leadership of projects involving multiple teams across functional domains

Excellent communication skills both with engineering colleagues and senior business leaders

Don’t meet every single requirement?

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Root, Inc., we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway!

Join us

At Root, we judge people based on the merit of their work, not who they are. If you are passionate about what this role entails and solving real problems, we encourage you to apply. We want to learn about you and what you can add to our team.

Who we are

We’re harnessing the power of technology to revolutionize insurance. Using machine learning and mobile telematic platforms, we’ve built one of the most innovative FinTech companies in the world. And we’re just getting started.

What draws people to Root

Our success is in large part due to our unwavering standards in hiring. We recognize that our products are only as good as the people building and promoting them. We want individuals who find solutions by going through the cycle of ideation to implementation with curiosity, rigor, and an analytical lens. Ask anyone who works here and you’ll hear similar reasons for why they joined:

Autonomy—for assertive self-starters, the opportunities to contribute are limitless.

Impact—by challenging the way it’s always been done, we solve problems that have a big impact on our business.

Collaboration—we encourage rich discussion and civil debate at every turn.

People—we are inspired by the collection of crazy-smart people around us.

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