Since when are you with Friendsurance?

This September I will celebrate three years at Friendsurance. I’m very happy to be part of the Friendsurance family.

Where do you currently work – in the office, at home office, or somewhere else? What do you prefer?

I currently work from home, and I enjoy it. It is very convenient, I do not need to spend my time commuting and I can eat home-cooked food as well. That being said, I think it is great to meet in the office once or twice per week – some meetings work better when you do them in person.

What is your responsibility at Friendsurance? What is the most interesting part of your job?

I work as an Engineering Manager, currently leading several teams. My main responsibility is to support the teams in building valuable products with reliable, scalable and maintainable technologies. Every day I make sure engineers in my teams are happy, productive, have interesting challenges and grow professionally. In my role, I also work on company level topics with other managers in order to drive and implement larger engineering and management topics.

What was the biggest challenge you have solved in your job so far?

I solved a few challenges during my time at Friendsurance. Some of them are technical, like introducing Event Bus into our architecture, addressing scalability and maintainability issues. Some of the challenges are managerial: improve efficiency and make sure we deliver the projects in time while meeting diverse dynamic expectations of our clients. What is important, that in the end, we have successfully mastered every challenge.

What do you like the most about working at Friendsurance?

I like our friendly and open-minded team from different cultures and backgrounds. We work together, solve challenges together and celebrate our success together. I like that we are pushing for small incremental improvements every day. I enjoy the challenges –  they are great opportunities for me to learn.

How did you find your way to the Insurtech space?

I found my way to Insurtech through Friendsurance. The new digitized approach to insurance services that helps customers and banks or insurance companies sparked my interest. I see a lot of potential in this business, as well as great opportunities to improve it with technological innovations.

What do you believe are the most exciting innovations and impactful technologies in the Insurtech space?

In the era of Big Data it is crucial to gain benefits from it with valuable insights, predictive analytics and other topics which help us to build innovative products. At Friendsurance we automatically detect insurance contracts, analyze bank transactions, identify main key life events and provide recommendations based on this data. We constantly learn from the data and create a better user experience.

From your perspective what are the greatest strengths of Friendsurance as a tech company?

We are working in an industry where scalability and stability of software is very important. I think it is our great strength that we invest in those topics at Friendsurance. We use mature and scalable AWS products. We have auto-scalable self-healing infrastructure powered by Kubernetes. With all this, we make sure to follow the industry regulation and specific compliance requirements of individual customers.

Do you use advanced architectures in the Friendsurance tech team?

We are tracking technology trends, testing, and adopting promising techs that can help us to deliver faster, have better quality, enable advanced features and user experience. It can be adopting stream processing powered with Kafka or our support of Infrastructure as Code approach. We are cloud-native, and use AWS services and products to enable powerful features that make our apps scalable and secure.

How do you prepare yourself for an AI-centric world?

We already live in an AI-centric world and use products enhanced with Machine Learning algorithms, recommendation services. We enhance our products at Friendsurance with Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics in order to improve customer experience and make company technologies stronger.

What would be your dream celebration of successfully delivering a product with your team?

I’d go traveling with the team. In the wintertime, I would go to Northern Finland, enjoy Northern Lights, skiing, great food and drinks. In summer, I’d prefer to go to Greece or Spain, swim in the sea, enjoy the sun, and sip some cocktails.

Learn more about the Friendsurance Tech Team!