Ladder

Life Insurance Just Got Easier. Instant. Simple. Smart.

Silicon Valley

51 - 100 Employees

11 - 25 Engineers

$50M - $100M Funding

Series B

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Ladder makes it easy for anyone to buy life insurance. Life insurance is an industry that hasn't changed for many years. We're rethinking the entire process using software. Other life insurance companies prioritize agents' experiences. We're making the consumer experience great instead.

Why join us?

You'll have a big impact in a huge, $130 billion industry! Agents and manual underwriting processes make getting life insurance difficult and miserable. The software you build here will change this and provide a great experience for users.
We care deeply about our company's mission. Our product helps people through some of the most difficult moments in their lives. One of our founders came up with the idea for Ladder because his father passed away when he was young. He saw first hand the importance of life insurance. It enabled him to get through college.
We're growing and gaining traction! We launched on January 10, 2017 and we've issued billions of life insurance coverage. Our CEO wrote a piece which showcases some of the ways we stand out! https://medium.com/ladderlife/heres-what-instant-life-insurance-really-looks-like-b86ae8f1d4f

Engineering at Ladder

Engineering team and processes

Our engineering team operates in one week sprints. We usually have five teams with two or three engineers apiece. Each sprint has a rotating lead. Each ticket is owned by a pod which is the smallest possible (but not smaller) set of people that have full decision making ability. Pods typically consist of two engineers and a designer. After every sprint, we reflect on what happened, what went well, and what didn't go well. Then we write a list of action items for next time. This process is really helpful for improving as a team. Finally, each week one engineer demos what they’ve built for the entire product team.

Technical Challenges

You'll be joining a small engineering team using the latest tools (functional programming, immutable infrastructure, containerized deployments) and modern practices (code review, continuous deployment) to solve a huge problem ($20 trillion coverage gap).
Have product ownership. Think deeply about our user experience and use data driven experiments to optimize it.

Projects you might work on

Build a high throughput Kafka consumer that transforms and streams data into our data warehouse for tables that are always up-to-date
Create and deploy your own service by using our self-service auto-deployment framework.
Build a new user flow as an A/B experiment to improve user experience and conversion

Tech stack

React

Docker

Clojure

ClojureScript

Terraform

Buck build

AWS

Kubernetes

Working at Ladder

Walk out Wednesday: Every Wednesday, we randomly partition everybody in the company into groups of 3 or 4. Each group goes out for lunch in Palo Alto. It's a fun way to get to know people at Ladder.

Katas: Each month a member of the team will come up with a fun programming challenge. Engineers (optionally) build solutions to these problems. Afterwards, we discuss approaches and solutions together. Past katas have included: finding an appropriate reviewer for a change based on previous commits, building a TCP echo server, and computing transitive dependencies using our code base's dependency graph.

Game Night: We get together monthly and play a variety of board games with pizza.