Chubb Life HK - Principal Engineer

Description
We are looking for a Staff or Principal Software Engineer to own the end-to-end technical architecture for one or more Chubb Life markets. This is a senior individual contributor role — at the same technical level as a Technical Lead — who writes production code, raises engineering standards, and drives measurable improvements in how we build and operate software.

The systems you'll work on serve millions of insurance customers and thousands of agents across Asia. You'll design and ship customer-facing policy and claims applications, agent and broker portals, payment gateway integrations, regulatory and partner reporting systems, and the middleware and APIs that connect them. Our stack is primarily Java and JavaScript (Node / Angular / React). We care about engineering depth, not a specific language — and we want someone who can mentor other engineers and raise the bar for the whole team.

About Our Team
Chubb is an internationally recognized global provider of insurance products, including property and casualty, accident and health, reinsurance, and life insurance. We are building a dynamic tech team that will drive the future of insurance. Our goal is to create a seamless connection between customers, agents, and partners across the entire insurance product lifecycle. We operate as a flat organization and place immense value on innovative ideas, technical expertise, attention to detail, and personal initiative.

Key Responsibilities
1. Technical Leadership & Domain Architecture
•    Own and evolve the system and solution architecture for your market(s). This will include customer and Agency/Broker-facing front-end apps, middleware and APIs, and policy administration and other systems of record. Ensure designs are robust, scalable, secure, and aligned with global reference architectures.
•    Make decisions on software architecture and implementation strategy and drive the adoption and test-driven development, common APIs and interfaces, and shared patterns across your domain.
•    Write high-quality application code in critical or complex areas, setting a strong example for other engineers in readability, testability, and performance.
•    Support feature development by leading system and solution design and planning with multiple stakeholders, balancing local business needs with shared platform capabilities.
•    Identify potential risks and technical challenges early and address them with timely, innovative, and pragmatic solutions   .

2. Uplifting Engineering Practices & Developer Tooling
•    Lean into the AI Software Development Lifecycle. Build the tooling required to dramatically improve software development agility and across local and remote development teams. Continuously refining how we design, build, test, and release software.
•    Champion automated testing and quality: help teams design testable architectures, set up and extend testing frameworks, and achieve appropriate unit, functional, and integration test coverage.
•    Promote and model modern software engineering practices, including Agile delivery, lifecycle management, version control (git) with effective branch and release strategies.
•    Collaborate with Platform Engineering, QA, and other enabling teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, development environments, and tooling, ensuring they meet developer needs and support 12-factor application principles in public cloud environments.
•    Foster a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence by mentoring and coaching engineers (including senior engineers), conducting thoughtful code reviews, and encouraging experimentation with new technologies where appropriate.

3. Cross-Stack Problem Solving & Operational Excellence
•    Investigate and resolve complex production and performance issues across the stack using debuggers, API clients (e.g., curl, Postman), centralized logging platforms (e.g., ELK, Grafana), and application performance monitoring tools (e.g., Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights, Dynatrace).
•    Guide teams in building observable, fault-tolerant systems with appropriate monitoring, logging, and alerting to support reliable operations in public cloud environments.
•    Help teams define and achieve meaningful quality and reliability metrics (e.g., error rates, performance baselines, incident reduction), influencing outcomes without formal people management responsibilities.

4. Cross-Team Collaboration & Feedback Loops
•    Produce working agreements, shared engineering standards, and runbooks with Platform Engineering, QA, and global teams in Singapore, India, and other centers; artifacts teams can actually use, not just governance discussions.
•    Turn local engineering insights into shipped improvements: when a shared library, CI pipeline, or deployment process is broken or absent for your market, own the fix end-to-end and deliver it.
•    Bridge global engineering direction and local market realities by building the integrations, adapters, and process changes needed to make global patterns work in your context.

Requirements

•    Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
•    6+ years’ experience in software engineering roles, with at least two years in a senior technical leadership capacity (e.g., senior, technical lead); history of learning new technologies quickly.
•    Experience shipping code in production across different parts of the technical stack (front end, web servers, core systems, enterprise integration layers, infrastructure as code).
•    Experience developing web applications in production in a public cloud environment.
•    Expertise in one or more server-side programming languages (e.g., Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Go, C#, Rust) and familiarity with modern web development frameworks/tools.
•    Strong understanding of Agile software engineering practices and teamwork.
•    Experience investigating and solving production problems both on-prem and on-cloud.
•    Experience using workflow management software (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow, BMC).
•    Familiarity with Linux-based servers, containerization and orchestration, and toolchains.
•    Excellent spoken and written communication skills to effectively interact with engineers, senior management, and global stakeholders; proactive attitude to solving multi-stakeholder problems.
•    Proficient in English (equivalent to IELTS 5.5, CEFR B2, or TOEFL 72).
•    For applicable markets, native-language listening proficiency and experience.
 

Nice to have

•    Contributions to open source projects.
•    Prior experience working with an international (English-speaking) team.  
•    Experience in or understanding of life insurance business practices and applications (e.g., policy administration, claims management, underwriting).
•    Experience developing responsive UX for web or mobile applications.