Engineering Lead (Player-Coach) - Node.js/React.js - AI-Native Teams

Who we are :

We’re Qover, a leading insurtech scale-up that has raised $70 million.

With an international team of 160+ colleagues based in Brussels, we help companies orchestrate digital embedded insurance experiences.

Since Qover was founded in 2016, our co-founders had a clear vision of the future of insurance: it must be simple, transparent and accessible across borders – a global safety net 🌍

We’re well on our way to building that safety net, with a platform that protects millions of users across 32 European countries. We work with top brands like Revolut, Mastercard, BMW, Canyon, Monzo and many others.

Visit our website for more about what we do!

The Opportunity: Your Next Big Leap

As an Engineering Lead at Qover, you will lead a product engineering team as both a people leader and a technically credible player-coach. You will be accountable for your team’s delivery, technical quality, production ownership and growth, in close partnership with Product and Design. You will stay close to the code, the customer problem and the operational reality - not operate as a detached architect or a delivery-reporting layer.

At Qover, you’ll help power embedded insurance experiences used by leading brands including Revolut, Mastercard, BMW and Monzo. Our platform operates across 32 countries and supports millions of end users through our partners.

You will initially lead one of our core product engineering teams. Depending on organisational needs and your experience, this could include our Policy Management Platform or another strategic domain within Qover’s insurance platform.

Lead the Charge: AI-Assisted Engineering

You will turn AI into a competitive edge by championing the pragmatic integration of AI tools within your team. Your role involves identifying high-impact applications for coding agents, defining clear and practical guardrails, and mentoring engineers to ensure that human accountability for security and quality remains paramount.

• Cultivate a thoughtful AI culture: Foster an environment where agents are used intentionally for implementation, debugging, and documentation to drive meaningful value.

• Establish responsible guardrails: Ensure no output is accepted blindly. You will manage data sensitivity and maintain rigorous human review, testing and ownership of AI-generated output.

• Coach for excellence: Guide your team on effective workflows, emphasizing strong technical specs and recognising when direct human judgment is more appropriate than automation.

• Measure what matters: Focus on outcomes like reduced toil and improved delivery flow rather than simply tracking tool adoption for its own sake.

• Scale best practices: Collaborate with Principal and Platform engineers to refine reusable tooling and share successful AI strategies across the entire organization.

Your Impact: What You’ll Do

You will own engineering outcomes end-to-end with your team, contributing from discovery and technical design through implementation, deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement.

Foster Talent & Drive Delivery

• Champion team execution: Partner with the PM to turn agreed priorities into realistic delivery plans, ensuring transparency around capacity and risks while maintaining a predictable, high-quality shipping cadence.

• Cultivate engineering growth: Mentor and develop your team through consistent feedback, performance management, and dedicated coaching to support their professional evolution.

• Build a high-trust culture: Promote an environment of psychological safety and accountability where issues are addressed early and improvements are continuous.

• Collaborative leadership: Work alongside fellow Engineering Leads to navigate dependencies and optimize cross-team workflows without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.

Stay Rooted in Technical Excellence

• Player-coach mentality: Stay engaged with the codebase to provide credible technical guidance—participating in designs, reviews, and incident resolution when required.

• Elevate the quality bar: Take ownership of your team’s standards for code and configuration quality, automated testing, security and privacy, observability, release readiness and maintainability. Ensure the team builds secure, reliable systems and addresses risks before they become production incidents.

• Operational Resilience: Ensure your team effectively runs and iterates on what they build, leading blameless post-mortems and driving structural fixes to recurring debt.

• Pragmatic decision-making: Balance speed, security, and technical debt to deliver maximum product value without compromising operational stability.

• Leverage expertise: Partner with Principal Engineers on complex, high-level missions while keeping daily technical ownership firmly within your team.

Bridge Product and Engineering

• Strategic partnership: Act as the technical counterpart to the Product Manager, collaborating on scoping and sequencing to prevent late-stage delivery surprises.

• Meaningful discovery: Provide technical perspective during refinement to help translate vague requirements into robust, workable software solutions.

• Design alignment: Connect with Designers to make usability and technical feasibility trade-offs explicit.

• Transparent communication: Articulate technical trade-offs to stakeholders, clearly justifying the selected path forward with a focus on practical outcomes.

Optimize the Ecosystem

• Eliminate friction: Actively reduce operational toil, recurring bugs, and unnecessary hand-offs to improve the overall flow of the engineering team.

• Champion shared tooling: Integrate shared platform capabilities and security best practices to make development cycles both safer and more efficient.

• Empower autonomy: Help engineers evolve into confident decision-makers, reducing the team's reliance on any single individual for technical direction.

Your Arsenal: The Skills You Bring

• Technical leadership and depth: Strong professional experience building and operating production systems, typically 7+ years. You bring sound engineering fundamentals and technical design judgment, and remain hands-on enough to guide design, review implementations critically and help solve difficult production problems. Qover’s platform is primarily built with TypeScript, Node.js, React and MongoDB, but we welcome leaders from other modern ecosystems — such as Java, C#, Go or Python — who can quickly become effective in a new stack. Experience with distributed systems, service boundaries and API design is important.

• Engineering ownership: You take responsibility for the quality, security, maintainability and operability of what ships. You provide thoughtful, high-signal code reviews and help your team maintain a strong quality bar.

• Delivery foundations: Experience with robust RESTful APIs, third-party integrations, data consistency, Git workflows, CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments.

• Cloud and operations: Experience working with cloud environments (GCP preferred). Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes is a plus. You are comfortable improving observability, release readiness and incident response.

• People leadership: Experience directly managing, coaching and developing engineers. You can create clarity, give direct feedback, handle performance conversations fairly and help a team perform and grow.

• Product partnership: Skilled at working with Product, Design and other stakeholders to make pragmatic trade-offs on scope, sequencing, technical risk and delivery.

• AI-native engineering leadership: You have hands-on experience using coding agents and AI tools to improve engineering throughput and quality. You are accountable for driving their responsible adoption across the team, defining workflows and guardrails, coaching engineers, and measuring where they create real value — without compromising human review, security, testing or accountability.

• Domain experience: Experience in insurance, fintech or another regulated and operationally complex domain is a strong advantage. Insurance expertise is not required, but you should be motivated to develop a strong understanding of the business domain you lead.

What Success Looks Like

• Reliable delivery: Your team translates roadmap goals into tangible results through transparent sequencing, realistic scoping, and a significant reduction in delivery surprises.

• Team growth and engagement: High levels of engagement and trust empower engineers to own their output, while performance coaching ensures talent challenges are resolved with clarity and fairness.

• System resilience: A measurable upward trend in technical quality and production stability, characterized by fewer recurring defects and a continuous decline in operational friction.

• Product–engineering partnership: Product and Engineering operate as a unified team, making collaborative trade-offs instead of relying on rigid hand-offs or repeated escalation.

• Effective AI-assisted engineering: Pragmatic adoption of AI tools that accelerates development speed without compromising the rigorous human-led standards for security, review, and ownership.

The Vibe: Who You Are

• The pragmatic player-coach: You care about clean, readable code and healthy engineering practices - and you know when to prioritise shipping, learning and iteration. You enjoy staying close enough to the work to help your team make good decisions.

• The adaptable explorer: You are comfortable in a scale-up environment: shifting priorities, ambiguity and finding the highest-impact work. You actively use AI-assisted engineering and are pragmatic about where it creates meaningful value.

• The communicator: You communicate clearly in writing and in conversation, ask good questions, and collaborate well across Product, Design, Engineering and other functions.

• The fun co-worker: You are constructive, kind and collaborative. You enjoy sharing knowledge through code reviews, pairing, mentoring and helping others grow.

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\nWhat’s in it for you:

• A flexible work environment: up to three days remote per week and the ability to work from anywhere one month per year

• 28 days off (8 extra days on top of the 20 legal days)

• A nice working space in a great location in Brussels: Qover-dedicated space at WeWork (Rue du Commerce 31) with a large terrace to enjoy team events

• A positive company culture that values teamwork and taking initiative but also having fun, with regular social events

• A collaborative and communal environment where everyone is welcomed, valued and accepted regardless of their nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, philosophical or political views, etc.

• The chance to work among entrepreneurial people, giving you the opportunity to learn and have a real impact at one of Europe’s fastest-growing insurtechs