Overview

Job Title: Pricing Automation Engineer

Location: London / Leicester / Bexhill

Welcome to Hastings Direct. We're a digital insurance provider with a clear strategy to become the best and biggest player in the UK market. As a company, we’ve invested in our technology, pricing, data and analytics capabilities, and in our people. The Finance team is building a market leading finance technology platform and focusing on leadership development to commercially add value to the business.

The advert invites you to explore #lifeatHD. If you’re excited about joining us, we’d love to hear from you.

We have high standards and understand some people may not apply unless they feel they tick every box. If you’re excited about joining us and think you have some of what we are looking for, even if you’re not 100% sure, we would love to hear from you.

Role Overview

Our mission is to create the leading suite of exploratory and data products in the industry—empowering our pricing, data and analytics (PDA) community to move faster and deliver more, with major commercial impact. Skywalker is our automated trading platform at the heart of what we do. It maximises underwriting pricing efficiency and hosts a growing toolkit adopted across the wider business. We’re expanding Skywalker’s capabilities and are looking for curious, motivated people to support the PDA community in getting the most out of it. This role is open to junior and mid-level applicants, including graduates, provided you meet the technical requirements and bring a learning mindset.

Why this might excite you

Our team works at the cutting edge of technology and automation, and we aspire to drive business success through innovation and smart technology. We believe great work happens when you’re supported, trusted, and doing something meaningful. This role offers:

• Learning: Through mentoring, pair programming, and on-the-job learning within a well-connected community that values delivery, growth and enjoyment.
• Autonomy: Freedom to solve real business problems in your own way.
• Purpose: Help streamline and scale pricing and underwriting across the business and be a key contributor at the intersection of pricing, modelling, engineering & more.
• Specialty: Build niche expertise in pricing automation, underwriting workflows and trading infrastructure.
• Clear expectations: In your first 3-6 months, you might prototype enhancements to the Skywalker toolkit, contribute to adoption and rollout across teams, and automate key underwriting data pipelines.

Essential skills/experience

Technical skills

• Python (scripting, automation, or light data wrangling)
• SQL (confident with queries and joins)
• Git & GitHub (branching, pull requests, code reviews)
• Some commercial awareness—pricing, market dynamics, underwriting, or strong business impact instinct

Personal

• Accountable: confident owning and solving problems and challenging the status quo
• Brilliant communicator: able to engage and trade information clearly
• Collaborative: enjoy helping others get the most out of Skywalker
• Responsive: comfortable context-switching across multiple workstreams
• Lifelong learner: seek growth with and without direction
• Curious: enjoy exploring how things work and how they can be improved
• Creative: comfortable prototyping or hacking to learn quickly
• Optimistic: believe change is possible and worth pursuing
• Highly analytical: able to interpret complex data, identify patterns and insights

Bonus round

Don’t worry if you don’t tick all the boxes—especially if you’re curious and eager to learn. We’ll help you build these skills.

Experience with:

• Automation of processes/pipelines for data, analytics or operations
• ML-specific Python libraries (e.g. pandas, scikit-learn, xgboost)
• Big data tooling (e.g. Snowflake/snowpark, pyspark)
• Cloud computing—especially Azure, where we deploy key parts of our platform

The interview process

Our interview process involves the below:

• Recruiter screening call
• Take home assessment
• Interview with hiring team

As a Disability Confident employer, we’re committed to inclusive recruitment. If you’re applying, you’ll have fair access to support and adjustments throughout the process. We also welcome applications through the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS). For more information, visit our inclusive business page on our careers website.

Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary you will also receive…

• Flexible working — hybrid approach; discuss details with your recruiter
• Competitive bonus scheme — annual 4Cs performance bonus
• Financial wellbeing — life assurance (4x salary), income protection, matched pension up to 10%, and additional wellbeing perks
• Mental wellbeing programme — Thrive app, 24/7 assistance, mental health first aiders, support groups
• Other perks — 25 days annual leave + bank holidays (buy/sell options), health care cash back, dental plans, Cycle to Work, tech schemes, onsite facilities, events

Join us and you’ll find a different way of doing things. We call it the 4Cs: right culture, tools and support to deliver good outcomes for customers, growth for the company, and community impact.

Hastings Group is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all suitably skilled persons regardless of gender, age, race, disability, ethnic background, religion/belief, sexual orientation, gender reassignment or marital/family status. The recruitment process includes references and checks where applicable.