Senior Core Platform Engineer

Instant Risk Coverage is an insurtech startup transforming how insurance is bought and sold. Our SaaS platform enables customers to purchase coverage instantly, bringing speed and simplicity to an industry that has historically had neither. We're at a pivotal moment — actively evolving from a tech-enabled insurance company into a true insurance platform company. That shift means building the foundations that let carriers, brokers, and customers connect, integrate, and transact through our technology.

The team is small, driven, and building for scale.

We're looking for a Senior Core Platform Engineer to help lay the technical foundations of IRC's platform and grow with us as we scale it. This role sits at the heart of what we're building: a platform that expresses our organizational capabilities through technology, enabling partners and customers to integrate with and build on top of IRC.

At the core of this role is the platform itself — the technology that makes IRC's capabilities real and accessible to the world. How we expose what we do through APIs, events, webhooks, GraphQL, and emerging paradigms like MCP isn't infrastructure work — it's our product. It's what makes us an insurance platform company rather than a company that uses technology to sell insurance.

You'll own how that surface is designed, built, and evolved, and your decisions here directly shape what IRC can offer to carriers, brokers, and customers.

Beyond the integration layer, you'll need a working mental model of the systems around you — front end, data, and infrastructure. Not because you'll own them, but because understanding how the pieces fit together is what lets you ask the right questions, catch cross‑cutting issues early, and make decisions that hold up as the platform grows. We don't need a specialist in every layer.

We need someone who knows what they don't know and isn't afraid to ask.

You use LLMs as a genuine part of how you work — not because it's the thing to say, but because you've developed real judgment about where they accelerate good engineering and where they introduce noise. You know the difference between AI as a force multiplier and AI as a shortcut that creates problems downstream.

This is still early‑stage company work. You've been in environments where not every decision can be the perfect one, and you've learned to make the trade‑off consciously. Knowing when to take on technical debt is the right call, and when it's time to slow down and build it properly. That kind of judgment is as important to us as the technical skill itself.

We work hybrid — one day a week in our downtown Toronto office. That day isn't a policy checkbox; it's how the team stays genuinely connected to each other and to the business we're building together.

• Design and build the platform's core capabilities: RESTful APIs, GraphQL, webhooks, and event‑driven interfaces that make IRC's organizational capabilities accessible to partners, carriers, and customers. This is our differentiator, not our infrastructure.
• Own core platform architecture decisions: service boundaries, data modelling, API contracts, and the foundational patterns other engineers build on.
• Lead integrations with third‑party carriers, payment processors, and SaaS partners — thinking through reliability, error handling, and long‑term maintainability, not just the happy path.
• Make and communicate pragmatic engineering trade‑offs — understanding when speed is the priority and when investing in engineering excellence pays off.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, architecture discussions, and mentoring engineers earlier in their careers.
• Establish and maintain backend standards: API design conventions, error…