Overview of Consumer Engineering at Ethos

Andrew Bright, Engineering Manager, Growth

For someone purchasing life insurance, the process can be daunting:

• If you were to apply for life insurance the traditional way, you would talk to an insurance agent who interviews the customer and writes their answers down on a physical form which is then mailed, faxed, or emailed to an insurance company.
• An underwriter looks at all of your answers.
• Depending on your answers, you may need to go to a doctor to get blood tests and medical tests.
• After waiting up to 10 weeks or more, you’ll hear back from the insurance company about a decision and the price you’ll pay.

Compared to the traditional process, buying a policy at Ethos seems like magic. The same customer could go onto the Ethos site, answer a few questions, get an instant decision and prices, and then become a covered policyholder in 10 minutes.

Consumer Engineering Requirements

Consumer engineering at Ethos works to build this user experience from the moment a customer lands on the Ethos site to becoming a protected customer. Like an analogous E-commerce company selling a physical product to a user, this involves supporting:

• A front-end user experience that provides a delightful way to capture user answers and dynamically asks questions based on the user’s previous answers (i.e. if you said you moved recently, where did you move from and how long ago?)
• A self-serve CMS platform that allows marketers and content editors to tell the Ethos story and value proposition and craft it to the many reasons customers purchase life insurance.
• A full system of marketing integrations that allows us to find users looking to purchase life insurance on platforms like Facebook and Google, TV and streaming platforms, radio stations, and others.
• An authentication system that uses password-less account management. This allows a user to conveniently return to their application by leveraging their email rather than needing to remember a new password.
• Integrations with lifecycle emails, drip campaigns, and SMS notifications.
• A payment system that allows users to pay with a variety of payment methods like credit card, ACH, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and others via a trusted, proven third-party payment solution.
• A quoting and pricing system that can calculate a price for users based on their unique answers and profile, and recommend coverage that best fits their needs.
• An accounting and policy administration system that manages document generation, recurring payments, policy changes, etc.
• A policyholder portal that allows users to see their policies, download important documents, configure payments, and more.

However, unlike a traditional e-commerce company, the real magic happens behind the scenes. To provide a seamless user experience, we must solve a myriad of technical complexities:

• Asking a user a dynamic interview that changes based on the previous answers. There are more than 1,000 possible questions that can be asked, resulting in a huge (combinatorial) number of unique interviews.
• Replacing medical and blood tests with other data sources including user-provided interview answers, driving records, and prescription history. This information is stored encrypted and with secure access controls.
• Providing a continuous underwriting experience. As we learn more about a user, we change our product recommendation and refine the unique price a user would pay.
• Building a technology layer on top of legacy processes including document generation and policy changes.

The Consumer Stack

This backend system is built on top of a number of microservices which decouple responsibilities for critical functionality. These services include:

• Identity Service, for storing information about users.
• Application Engine Service, which can generate dynamic interview answers (owned by our Platform team).
• Underwriting Engine, which can evaluate a user’s answers in real time (owned by our Underwriting team).
• Policy Service, responsible for policy administration.
• A monolithic API, which handles the application journey of the user. This service is currently being decomposed into additional microservices secured by a unified API gateway over the next year.

Most of our microservices are built on Typescript and NodeJS but we also use Python and Golang depending on the use case. Most of our microservices use relational databases, largely PostgreSQL, and Redis as the storage and caching layers. The frontend system is built with React and Redux and uses modern design patterns like React Hooks.

Andrew Bright, Engineering Manager, Growth

Drew joined Ethos in January 2019 and leads the Consumer Engineering team. When Drew isn’t building new products at Ethos, he enjoys cycling, boxing, and playing jazz guitar. Interested in joining Drew’s team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.