About Ethos
Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the role
The Underwriting Rules Performance Associate is a detail-oriented underwriting professional responsible for reviewing automated underwriting decisions to ensure accuracy, consistency, and alignment with Ethos’ guidelines and risk appetite. This role sits at the intersection of traditional underwriting expertise and modern insurtech — playing a direct role in improving the intelligence of our rules engine and protecting the integrity of every policy we issue. As the Underwriting Engine Integrity team matures, this role is expected to evolve beyond case review into structured rules testing, scenario validation, and regression analysis — making it a strong fit for an underwriter who wants to grow with the function, not just within it. This is a unique opportunity to join a small but highly important team where members will have the ability to shape processes and operate with a high degree of ownership. Early team members will play a foundational role in building and scaling the function, with the opportunity to contribute beyond traditional underwriting responsibilities and help define how underwriting quality and engine integrity evolve at Ethos.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Conduct high-volume reviews of automated underwriting decisions, targeting approximately 50 cases per day as part of a team goal of 300–500 cases per week
- Evaluate engine decisions against current underwriting guidelines, flagging discrepancies, misclassifications, and edge cases for escalation
- Document audit findings with clear, standardized notation using established scoring and workflow tools
- Identify recurring patterns in engine errors or decision gaps and surface findings to the Manager, Underwriting Engine Integrity, with enough specificity to enable triage and actioning under the team’s findings framework
- Collaborate with the Underwriting Strategies team to validate the real-world impact of rules engine changes
- Maintain current knowledge of Ethos underwriting guidelines, product updates, and industry best practices
- Contribute to the continuous improvement of audit criteria, checklists, and workflows; as the team’s testing capabilities expand, support the development of scenario test cases and regression validation protocols for pre- and post-production rules changes
- Support onboarding and calibration sessions to ensure consistency across the team; actively contribute to a team culture where questions are encouraged, errors are surfaced without fear, and calibration is treated as a learning process rather than a performance event
- Participate in the findings triage and feedback loop by reviewing resolved findings, flagging re-occurrences, and confirming resolution effectiveness — ensuring that audit output translates into measurable engine improvement, not just documentation
- Future-State Responsibilities (as team capabilities expand): Support the build-out and execution of a scenario testbed framework, including authoring unit test cases, running pre-production regression testing for rules changes, and validating ARE outputs against signed ruleset specifications. These responsibilities will be transitioned to this team from Engineering as governance infrastructure matures
Qualifications and Skills:
- 3–7+ years of life insurance underwriting experience; individual or group case management background is acceptable, but direct life underwriting is strongly preferred
- Familiarity with automated underwriting systems, rules engines, or decision support tools
- Strong attention to detail and ability to maintain accuracy at high review volumes
- Ability to clearly document findings and communicate trends to leadership
- Comfortable working in a structured, metrics-driven environment
- Experience with workflow or case management tools; JIRA or similar platforms a plus
- A collaborative mindset and genuine comfort with ambiguity — this team is building new infrastructure, and the ability to contribute to a psychologically safe environment where honest feedback and open calibration are the norm is as important as technical skill
#LI-Hybrid
#LI-PP1
Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the SF Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records.
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Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.