Staff Product Engineer

Hi 👋 I’m Rich Ashworth, Director of Engineering at hyperexponential. I lead the Model Authoring value stream that owns the products our customers use to write and manage their pricing models. An actuary might start with an Excel rater and finish with a Python model that has been reviewed, approved, and is pricing live business. Our job is to turn that into an exceptional user experience and make every step of that credible enough to trust. I'm hiring a Staff Product Engineer to help set our technical direction and build the next version of our products. It's an individual contributor role, but influence is a huge part of it: the standards the pods work to, the shared enablers underneath the product, and the interfaces where our problems meet other teams'. You’ll be hands-on where the risk is highest. There's no established playbook for any of this, but there’s an incredible opportunity in front of us. If this sounds like a role that would excite you, I'd love to hear from you.

About hyperexponential

(hx) At hyperexponential, we're building the AI-powered platform that enables the world's most critical decisions in a £7 trillion industry, which risks to take, and how to price them. These are the decisions that shape real-world outcomes: whether rockets successfully launch into space, autonomous vehicles make it to market, or communities recover after major storms. Until now, insurance has been making billion-pound decisions using outdated tools. We're changing that. Our platform brings together data, AI, and human expertise to give insurers the fastest path from submission to decision - helping them move faster, act smarter, and take on more risk with confidence. Backed by a16z, Highland Europe, and Battery Ventures, we're scaling globally - already trusted by nearly 50 of the world's largest insurers, with zero churn and billions in premiums flowing through hx. What began as a single product in one market has rapidly evolved into a multi-product, multi-territory platform powering every stage of pricing and underwriting. AI is at the core of what we do - from building the world's first domain-specific AI peer programmer for insurance (think GitHub Copilot with a PhD in actuarial science) to shaping agentic workflows that reinvent how this industry operates. What makes hx different is the people who build it. Here, impact isn't tied to title or tenure; it's defined by the challenges you take on and the discipline you bring. Surrounded by peers who stretch you, you'll do the best, hardest work of your life in a company engineered to endure. If that sounds like you, join us in building what comes next. About the Model Authoring team Model Authoring owns the products our customers use to write and manage their pricing models: the model developer experience and our actuarial agent. An actuary might start with an Excel-based rater and finish with a Python model that has been reviewed, approved and is pricing live business. Our job is to make every step of that credible enough to trust. The team is distributed across our Warsaw and London offices. As the Staff Product Engineer, you will help set the team's technical direction. This is an individual contributor role, but influence is a large part of it: you'll help define the standards the team works to, raise the technical bar across pods, and own the interfaces where our problems meet those of teams elsewhere in Technology. You'll be expected to move fast and start shaping technical conversations early. We work in an AI-native way, and you'll help define and evolve what that means here.

What you'll be doing

Establish a set of engineering standards across the Model Authoring pods. The standards are documented and actively referenced in code review, with new pod work conforming by default. Set and own the technical direction for the team's shared enablers, including how we represent and persist models, the model registry, secure context access, and shared agentic infrastructure. Establish the technical interfaces between Model Authoring and other parts of the business. Dependencies with other teams are agreed, documented, and progressing without needing to be brokered by someone else. Work hands-on on the hardest problems in the stream. This is not an advisory role: we would expect you in the code where the risk is highest. Help define how we work in an AI-native way. Which parts of model development and of our own engineering we hand to agents, what stays human, and what evidence we need before trusting either. Visibly lift the engineers around you. You're sought out for design input across pods, and there's at least one engineer whose growth is clearly attributable to your support. What you'll need to have done Worked in an AI-native environment, and genuinely want to keep doing so. You've used AI or agentic tools in your own engineering workflow, introduced or experimented with them, and have a real view on what's worked and what hasn't. Been product-focused rather than purely technical. You understand who your users are, where their pain points are, and how your technical decisions connect to commercial outcomes. Set technical direction while navigating genuine ambiguity. A proven track record of owning architecture in a domain with no established playbook, and making clear calls on imperfect information rather than deferring them. Owned a significant technical challenge or service end to end, with the depth to walk through it in detail - the trade-offs, the contracts, the things you'd do differently. Influenced across teams. You can hold a position under challenge, genuinely listen to pushback, and persuade others - not just present your own view and hope it lands. Worked effectively across distributed teams - this role spans our Warsaw and London offices, so you'll need to be comfortable building relationships and influence across both.

Nice to have

Developer experience work, ideally having built tools for developers or - in our case - act