Great Engineering + Fantastic Team x Thoughtful Mission = Awesome Client: Assured.Claims

Assured’s Claims Intelligence Platform is bringing insurance claims into the 21st Century. Claims processing (i.e., should we pay this claim?), while often overlooked, is the foundation of the entire industry. It’s currently highly manual, involving phone calls, faxes, and gut instinct—costing tens of billions of dollars a year. The Assured platform helps to ingest and augment structured claims data, empowering their customers to make good decisions. They provide large insurers the software solutions they need to win in a modern, technology-driven world. From self-service claim filing software to backend fraud detection, Assured is the engine that powers claims processing for some of the largest insurers in the world.

The Gray Scalable team is thrilled to be working alongside our Assured teammates to expand our nimble, hands-on team. Take the next step in your engineering career and join Assured to help modernize insurance—an exciting challenge requiring a high degree of competency in multiple disciplines, simultaneously. You would be working alongside Theo Patt, co-founder and CTO, to build out their world class software.?

Get to know Theo, the CTO behind Assured:??

Tell us a little more about you before Assured…

I taught myself to code when I was 10, building websites and mobile games. I got started in the ‘real world’ of software engineering working on MediaWiki, the open source project behind Wikipedia, and eventually became a core contributor. Before Assured, I started Eventive, now the leading electronic film film festival ticketing and streaming platform, and grew it to thousands of customers and eight figures of revenue.?

Let’s talk about the story behind the company, and how you’re shaping the tech team…

Assured was born out of my belief that introducing great, modern software to traditionally stale and archaic businesses can transform entire industries. Just because others overlook problems like insurance claims doesn’t mean they are any less urgent; by solving them we can create incredible value and deliver great experiences in some of the most important industries on the planet.?

We’re building our team to execute on this vision. Staying small and nimble, empowering autonomy and experimentation, and encouraging team members to iterate in the pursuit of their vision has allowed us to execute far beyond our size.?

How does the team work? What are your ideas and goals around collaboration, team working, and individual contributions?

In my experience, the best teams strike the right balance between freedom and structure. We stay laser focused on the problem (what customer problem are we solving), but remain flexible on the solution and how it’s realized. Simply put: strong opinions, weakly held, embraced across the entire ideation-to-execution stack.?

This results in a team that is functionally independent but strongly synergistic. Each team member is unencumbered to execute as they do best, but we distribute work, critique, and build upon one another openly and with low ego. With this balance, the team is much more than the sum of its parts.?

What does the tech stack look like/include?

We’re still in the early days of Assured. The best tech stack is one that a) works and b) sets us up for future success. We try to make decisions that are just the right level of ‘engineered’—investing extra effort in core differentiators in our products, while using more off-the-shelf technologies and techniques for the meat and potatoes of building modern applications.

Right now, most of our codebase is written in TypeScript (Node.js on the backend, React on the frontend), with a GraphQL API layer, a PostgreSQL database, a Redis caching layer, and a sprinkling of other nascent explorations. We work in a monorepo on a largely monolithic application, deployed on AWS.

As we evolve, so will the technologies we use. We’re excited to build a team that brings fresh perspectives and approaches to the work we’re doing, including making decisions about new technology to add to the stack!

What projects are you currently working on or excited about?

As we deploy new products at large-scale (think top-20 insurers in the U.S.), deep challenges necessarily emerge.

Our consumer-facing products are unique in that people usually interact with them only once, in a time of great need and distress. From a user experience standpoint, we have to create experiences that effectively gather the information carriers need to process claims, while also being empathetic and comforting at this key touchpoint in that person’s relationship with their insurance carrier. I’m excited about opportunities we have to significantly increase the quality of this interaction (like our recent work to make it way easier to get a rental car or tow truck directly to the scene of the accident, without any of the usual waiting on hold or confusing back and forth about locations)—it’s rewarding to be able to work with such a direct consumer impact, and then see how that work immediately impacts real people’s lives.

What are you looking the most forward to accomplishing in 2022 in terms of the tech team at Assured? What do you see for the future of the team?

Now that we’ve gathered all this rich structured claims data, I’m particularly excited about the downstream automation projects that we’re beginning to work on. For example, our Liability Assessment engine, which uses rich multidimensional accident data to predict who is at fault in the incident, is poised to save carriers hundreds to thousands of dollars per claim and hours of time. Our unique dataset drives the intel to build these types of services and deliver unique value.

We’re also working on our Catastrophe response suite of products—actively predicting upcoming storms and weather events, and helping insurers respond. Doing so faster, more accurately, and at lower cost doesn’t just add value to our customers; it turns a stressful claims experience to a positive one and puts money back into the pockets of consumers.??

Are you ready for the next step in your engineering career? Join the team at Assured—apply today.?