Senior Core Platform Engineer

Instant Risk Coverage is an insurtech startup transforming how insurance is bought and sold. Our SaaS platform enables customers to purchase coverage instantly, bringing speed and simplicity to an industry that has historically had neither. We're at a pivotal moment — actively evolving from a tech-enabled insurance company into a true insurance platform company. That shift means building the foundations that let carriers, brokers, and customers connect, integrate, and transact through our technology. The team is small, driven, and building for scale.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Core Platform Engineer to help lay the technical foundations of IRC's platform and grow with us as we scale it. This role sits at the heart of what we're building: a platform that expresses our organizational capabilities through technology, enabling partners and customers to integrate with and build on top of IRC.

At the core of this role is the platform itself — the technology that makes IRC's capabilities real and accessible to the world. How we expose what we do through APIs, events, webhooks, GraphQL, and emerging paradigms like MCP isn't infrastructure work — it's our product. It's what makes us an insurance platform company rather than a company that uses technology to sell insurance. You'll own how that surface is designed, built, and evolved, and your decisions here directly shape what IRC can offer to carriers, brokers, and customers.

Beyond the integration layer, you'll need a working mental model of the systems around you — front end, data, and infrastructure. Not because you'll own them, but because understanding how the pieces fit together is what lets you ask the right questions, catch cross‑cutting issues early, and make decisions that hold up as the platform grows. We don't need a specialist in every layer. We need someone who knows what they don't know and isn't afraid to ask.

You use LLMs as a genuine part of how you work — not because it's the thing to say, but because you've developed real judgment about where they accelerate good engineering and where they introduce noise. You know the difference between AI as a force multiplier and AI as a shortcut that creates problems downstream.

This is still early‑stage company work. You've been in environments where not every decision can be the perfect one, and you've learned to make the trade‑off consciously. Knowing when to take on technical debt is the right call, and when it's time to slow down and build it properly. That kind of judgment is as important to us as the technical skill itself.

We work hybrid — one day a week in our downtown Toronto office. That day isn't a policy checkbox; it's how the team stays genuinely connected to each other and to the business we're building together.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build the platform's core capabilities: RESTful APIs, GraphQL, webhooks, and event‑driven interfaces that make IRC's organizational capabilities accessible to partners, carriers, and customers. This is our differentiator, not our infrastructure.
• Own core platform architecture decisions: service boundaries, data modelling, API contracts, and the foundational patterns other engineers build on.
• Lead integrations with third‑party carriers, payment processors, and SaaS partners — thinking through reliability, error handling, and long‑term maintainability, not just the happy path.
• Make and communicate pragmatic engineering trade‑offs — understanding when speed is the priority and when investing in engineering excellence pays off.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, architecture discussions, and mentoring engineers earlier in their careers.
• Establish and maintain backend standards: API design conventions, error handling patterns, testing practices, and service design principles that scale with the team.
• Stay close to the problem space — developing enough understanding of the insurance and platform context to make good technical decisions, not just implement specs.

Required Qualifications

• 6–10 years of backend software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent building platform or integration‑layer systems.
• Deep expertise in Node.js and TypeScript in production environments.
• Strong command of platform integration paradigms — REST, GraphQL, webhooks, and event‑driven architecture — and the trade‑offs between them.
• Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design, query writing, and thinking carefully about data access patterns.
• A working mental model of the full system — front end, data, and deployment — sufficient to ask the right questions, spot cross‑cutting issues, and collaborate effectively without needing to own every layer.
• Pragmatic, grounded fluency with LLMs as engineering tools — you get real value from them and you understand their limits.
• Demonstrated ability to own architecture decisions, set technical direction, and bring others along on a small team.
• Experience in early‑stage or high‑growth environments where pragmatic trade‑offs are part of daily engineering life.
• Strong communication skills and comfort working cross‑functionally with product, design, and operations.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or experience building AI‑accessible platform interfaces.
• Background in insurtech, fintech, or other regulated SaaS industries.
• Experience with AWS services relevant to backend workloads (ECS, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) and infrastructure‑as‑code tools (Terraform or AWS CDK).
• Knowledge of compliance or data privacy requirements in cloud‑hosted SaaS products.
• Exposure to workflow engines or integration middleware (e.g., Medusa.js or similar).

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• A meaningful early role in shaping IRC's platform — with real influence over technical direction as the company scales.
• Hybrid work model with a collaborative downtown Toronto office — one day a week to connect with the team and the business.
• A culture of constructive innovation: high ownership, candid conversations, and a pragmatic view of how AI and modern tooling fit into good engineering.
• The opportunity to help change how insurance works — not just build software on top of the status quo.

Salary Range for this Role is $130,000 - $160,000 CAD