ABOUT BESTOW
Life insurance is one of the world's most important products. It's also one of the hardest to build, distribute, and modernize. Bestow exists to change that.
Bestow is a leading vertical technology platform serving some of the largest and most innovative life insurers. Our platform unifies the fragmented, legacy value chain, enabling carriers to launch products in weeks instead of years. Carriers choose us to scale and operate at unprecedented speed, powered by AI and automation.
Bestow isn't selling policies. We're building the infrastructure that helps an entire industry move faster, reach more people, and deliver on its promise.
Backed by leading investors (Goldman Sachs, Hedosophia, NEA, Valar, 8VC) and trusted by major carriers, Bestow is powered by a team that moves with precision, purpose, and heart. If you want to help reimagine a centuries-old industry with lasting impact, join us.
Bestow offers flexible remote/hybrid work, meaningful benefits, equity, and substantial growth opportunities.
Bestow uses E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit E-Verify.gov.
ABOUT THE TEAM
The Engineering team is responsible for all technology for Bestow and the Bestow Platform. We serve employees, consumers, and enterprise customers. In addition to building software, we integrate and manage many third-party products used by employees and as part of the platform. Our major functional teams are product engineering, infrastructure, IT, data & analytics, and program management. Engineering works closely with product management and design to define and prioritize the product roadmap.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
As the Engineering Manager for the IAM team, you will lead a team of Software Engineers building the identity and access management foundation behind our digital life insurance enrollment experience. You will spend roughly 20% of your time writing production code, and that capacity is accounted for in team planning. The rest of your time goes to leading the team, shaping architecture, and partnering with Product Managers, Designers, and our enterprise partners. Our system runs on Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform and is composed of several microservices written in Go that integrate using gRPC, REST, and async messaging patterns. You will share responsibility for operating those workloads.
Your first major initiative is IAM Platform Scalability: building an identity foundation that lets new enterprise customers onboard without engineering intervention, while meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements.
This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is open to remote candidates within the United States. #LI-Remote
Technical Leadership:
Stay in the code and actively participate in system design and architecture decisions
Review pull requests regularly, with feedback that raises the bar on code quality
Own your team's quality standards: test coverage, documentation, code review practice, and the automation and quality gates that keep defects out of production
Debug and troubleshoot alongside your engineers, and lead the team through hard diagnostic work
Identify technical debt, build a remediation plan for it, and advocate for the time to do it
IAM Initiative Ownership:
Lead the evolution of our authorization model to support multi-tenant enterprise customers at scale
Architect the separation of authentication and authorization so each can scale, cache, and enforce policy independently across enterprise partnerships
Design a token strategy that balances security, partner flexibility, and platform cost, and manage the vendor relationships that go with it
Build automated user provisioning and de-provisioning so partner onboarding does not require engineering work
Solve for partner-specific requirements such as biometric re-authentication, extended session lifetimes, layered access policies, and regulatory audit needs
Operational Health and On-Call:
The IAM team shares a weekly on-call rotation covering authentication and authorization services, and this role takes a regular turn in it alongside the engineers on the team. We treat rotation health as a first class part of the job: right sized alerting, current runbooks, and following through on the operational fixes that keep the load predictable.
You will own the observability, monitoring, and alerting for your services, track uptime and incident metrics, and lead incident response when it is your team's service.
Building and Developing the Team:
Recruit, interview, and hire engineers for your team, and partner closely with Talent Acquisition on pipeline and calibration
Own the onboarding experience for new engineers, including current documentation and thoughtful 30, 60, and 90 day plans
Hold regular 1:1s focused on growth, and build individual development plans tied to what each engineer actually wants from their career
Coach engineers on both technical and professional skills, and find them stretch assignments that move them forward
Build an inclusive team where people trust each other enough to disagree productively, and address team conflict directly when it comes up
Performance and Delivery:
Set clear, measurable expectations, give documented and actionable feedback, and run fair performance reviews with unambiguous outcomes
Address underperformance with both empathy and urgency, and raise it early rather than late
Translate product requirements into technical plans, estimate your team's capacity and timelines honestly, and deliver against those estimates
Own a realistic team roadmap and make the daily prioritization calls that keep it real
Track your team's delivery metrics, report on them in the monthly operating review, and come with a plan when something dips
Vision and Stakeholder Partnership:
Set a technical north star for IAM that your team can make decisions against, and execute toward it incrementally rather than in one big bet
Translate company strategy into team-level work through RFCs, PRD input, and well-scoped tickets
Communicate status, progress, and risk to stakeholders early and transparently, and escalate with a proposed solution attached
Explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including senior leadership and external partners
Connect your team's work to business outcomes and make cost and benefit trade-offs explicit
AI Adoption and Innovation:
Model effective use of AI coding tools and set the standard for how agent generated changes get reviewed, tested, and attributed
Level up your team's AI practice through hands-on workshops, shared prompting patterns, and continuous iteration on the team's approach
Ensure the team follows security and quality best practices for AI tool usage
Create room for experimentation and calculated risk, and treat failed experiments as learning the team talks about openly
WHO YOU ARE
An Engineering Manager at Bestow is a highly technical leader who works at the intersection of people and technology. In this role you will be both a hands-on contributor and a people leader, and you find real satisfaction in both halves of that job.
Core Requirements:
8+ years of professional software experience, including 1+ years directly managing a team of Software Engineers while staying hands-on in the code
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
Professional experience with Go, or another statically typed backend language with a clear path to Go
Production experience with cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes or a comparable container orchestration platform
Experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database, comfortable writing ANSI SQL
Experience designing modern distributed systems and APIs, including Docker for local development and tools such as Protocol Buffers, OpenAPI, or Swagger
Lead with an end-to-end ownership mentality, combining high organizational standards with excellent communication to build, retain, and empower high-performing engineering teams.
IAM and Authentication Experience (Highly Desired, Not Required):
Identity provider depth: hands-on experience with Auth0, Okta, or a similar platform, including tenant and organization configuration, connection management, and custom logic such as Rules or Actions
OAuth 2.0 and OIDC: working knowledge of OAuth flows, OpenID Connect, token types, JWT validation, and token lifecycle concerns like caching, rotation, and revocation
Multi-tenant architecture: designing authentication systems with tenant isolation, partner-specific branding, SSO configuration, and audit logging that holds up in a regulated industry
Authorization patterns: RBAC, ABAC, or policy-based access control, and experience separating authentication from authorization
Enterprise SSO and provisioning: integrating SAML 2.0 and OIDC connections for B2B partnerships, and SCIM for automated provisioning
How You Work:
Deep understanding of the full software development lifecycle, from feature inception through system maintenance, continuous integration, and release strategy
Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools on a production codebase. Claude Code is the standard at Bestow and direct experience with it is preferred; comparable experience with tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot transfers well
Track key metrics and consistently meet established Service Level Agreements
Break down ambiguous technical problems and identify areas of risk early
Able to pick up and ship work in the team's codebases when the team needs it
TOTAL REWARDS
At Bestow, we’re proud to be awarded for our team members, innovative products, and culture. Our standard benefits include:
Competitive salary and equity based on role
Policies and managers that support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave programs
100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance
Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing
Flexible work-from-home policy and open to remote
Remote and WFH options, as well as a beautiful, state-of-the-art office in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, for those who prefer an office setting
Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives
Recent Employer Awards include:
Best Place for Working Parents 2023 + 2024 + 2025
Great Place to Work Certified, 2022 + 2023 + 2024 + 2025
Built In Best Places to Work, 2022 + 2023 + 2025
Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Texas 2022 + 2023
Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Financial Services and Insurance 2022 + 2023 + 2024
We value diversity at Bestow. The company will hire, recruit, and promote regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, pregnancy or maternity, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We understand the importance of creating a safe and comfortable work environment and encourage individualism and authenticity in every team member.
Thanks for considering a job at Bestow!
Requires 8+ years of software experience, 1+ year managing software engineers, hands-on Go or comparable backend experience, cloud and Kubernetes experience, relational database and distributed systems expertise, and a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
Key Responsibilities
- leading engineers
- shaping architecture
- managing incidents
Skills & Tools
Go, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, gRPC, REST, PostgreSQL, ANSI SQL, Docker, Protocol Buffers, OpenAPI, Swagger, Auth0, Okta, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, SAML 2.0, SCIM, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, AI
Job Details
- Category: Engineering
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — United States or Dallas
- Salary: USD 156,000 – 195,000 / year
- Languages: English
Benefits
- Generous paid time off
- Retirement plan
- Generous parental leave
About Bestow
A vertical technology platform that helps life insurers launch and operate products using AI and automation. — Industry: Information Technology