🧢 Who we are:

At Root, we believe that the future of insurance is digital, personalised and embedded.

Our mission is to grow insurance businesses into this future by providing the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Insurance matters—it protects lives, livelihoods, and futures. Yet much of the world remains underinsured due to inaccessible, poorly timed, or generic products. The world needs better insurance: relevant, affordable, and delivered in the right moments. We help our clients create these solutions, scaling innovative products that meet real needs.

As a Fullstack Engineer, you’ll work with world-class team members to build systems and tools at the heart of big names in South Africa and the UK, making a tangible impact on people’s lives—helping protect and empower individuals and families around the world.

You can read up more on some of the tools we’ve created to build insurance products in our docs here. This is an exciting opportunity for a proactive person who is passionate about building impactful and meaningful tech with a team like of like-minded people.

This full-time role is based at our De Waterkant office in Cape Town, working on a hybrid work model – 1 day / week in office.

🛠️ What you’ll do:

• Feature Development: Deliver robust, scalable, and maintainable fullstack solutions using React, TypeScript, and Node.js.
• Testing Excellence: Write and maintain high-quality tests using Jest, Mocha Chai Sinon, or equivalent frameworks, ensuring code reliability and reducing regressions.
• Collaboration: Actively participate in architectural and software design discussions, and contribute to decision-making.
• Code Ownership: Take ownership of end-to-end feature delivery, ensuring high performance, maintainability and security standards.User Impact: Develop user-facing and backend features that directly address customer needs, improving both developer and user experiences.
• System Robustness: Maintain and enhance the platform’s stability, security, and scalability to support business growth.
• Documentation: Produce clear, actionable, and accessible documentation for tools, processes, and codebases.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with design, product, and business teams to align technical solutions with organisational goals.

💪 We are looking for someone with:

• Front-End Expertise: Proficient in React and TypeScript, with experience in building intuitive and responsive user interfaces.
• Back-End Proficiency: Skilled in Node.js and Express or equivalent frameworks, with a strong understanding of RESTful APIs.
• Testing Practices: Deep familiarity with testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Mocha, Chai, Sinon) and a strong belief in Test-Driven Development (TDD).
• Database Knowledge: Strong experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and familiarity with designing efficient schemas, optimising queries, and managing migrations.
• Frontend State Management: Proficiency in state management tools like Redux, MobX, or React Context to build scalable and maintainable frontend applications.
• Cloud Platforms: Familiarity with AWS for deploying and scaling web applications. Our stack is predominantly in Fargate (ECS), Lambda and Aurora (PostgreSQL)
• Experience: 3–10+ years of fullstack development in a high-level programming language.

Bonus points/nice to have

• Experience in the insurance or fintech industry.
• Experience working with product designers or a basic understanding of UX principles to build user-friendly applications.

🤩 Root Values:

• Lead by example: “Lean in, take charge, and always set a positive precedent.”
• Exceed expectations: “Know your customer to delight your customer.”
• Rally as one team: “Put aside egos and personal agendas to triumph as one.”
• Own the mission: “Your job is not done until the job is done.”
• Rise to the challenge: “Meaningful change requires meaningful effort and the courage to make bold moves.”

🚀 How we enable success:

Our team is made up of smart, passionate, and kind individuals working together to build a world-class business. We take the time to develop personal relationships with each other. Over and above daily team lunches, we do frequent team outings and ad-hoc adventures.

We create and enable an environment for people to do their best work. To support this, we focus on a culture of autonomy, transparency and trust. As a startup, we care a lot about innovation, and believe in an iterative way of working to drive innovation forward. We encourage each other and foster a working culture of sharing early versions of our work and implementing feedback fast.

🤝 Why join us?

We have ambitious goals. Our mission is to power innovators in insurance, globally, and we’re well on our way there. You’ll join at a very exciting part of the journey, and your contribution over the next few years will directly and visibly impact Root’s global success. Our team is incredibly friendly and collaborative. If you care about solving challenging problems with people you enjoy being around, this is the place for you.

Please note… Root has an inclusive culture. We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply and introduce their skill set to us. Open positions at Root are competitive and we often receive high volumes of applicants. If you have not received further updates on your application after three weeks, you’re welcome to request feedback.

Department

Product & Engineering

Locations

Cape Town, South Africa

Remote status

Hybrid Remote

Employment type

Full-time