Insurtech engineering from the founder who shipped a unicorn's payment service
Quote engines, policy admin, claims intake, carrier integrations. Senior engineer on subscription with fintech-grade compliance awareness. $3,499/mo.
Who this is for
Insurtech founder, broker-tech CEO, or corporate intrapreneur inside an insurance group needing an MVP or ongoing delivery with compliance discipline baked in.
The pain today
- Need compliant, investor-ready MVP with no senior engineer on the team
- Legacy insurance tech slows every feature release
- Carrier API integrations are painful and error-prone
- Previous contractor shipped code that cannot pass compliance review
- Fundraising pressure — product must demo soon
The outcome you get
- Insurtech MVP or ongoing delivery on subscription at $3,499/mo
- Investor-ready product in 4 to 10 weeks (GigEasy pattern)
- Carrier integration work with proper testing and idempotency
- Compliance baseline (audit logs, access controls, encryption) from day one
- Handoff-ready code for a full-time hire
What makes insurtech MVPs different
Three things. Compliance awareness from day one — unlike general SaaS, insurtech cannot retrofit audit logs and access controls later. Carrier integration complexity — APIs vary widely in quality, many carriers lack documented APIs entirely, sandbox-to-production paths are painful. Regulatory scrutiny — state insurance departments (US) and FCA/EIOPA equivalents (UK/EU) do review digital products; details matter. An insurtech MVP needs to ship fast without taking shortcuts that create compliance or regulatory debt. Senior engineering from the start is non-negotiable.
Quote engines, policy admin, claims — what to build first
The order depends on your product. For direct-to-consumer insurance startups, quote engine first (it is the growth lever). For broker-tech products, policy admin or commission management first (it is the value lever). For claims-focused products, claims intake first. The MVP should cover one core flow end-to-end, not all three at 30 percent completion. I help you prioritise based on what your first customer needs and what investors need to see. Shipping one flow brilliantly beats three flows half-built.
Carrier integrations and sandboxes
Carrier APIs range from modern REST/GraphQL (Lemonade, Root, Next Insurance partner APIs) to SOAP/XML (most legacy carriers) to email-and-PDF (small regional carriers). Each requires a different approach. For modern APIs, direct integration with idempotency and webhook handling. For SOAP, careful schema work and retry logic. For email/PDF, structured intake with OCR and human review in the loop. At bolttech I shipped integration work against 40+ payment providers with 99.9 percent uptime — same discipline applies to carrier integrations with even more compliance rigor.
Pricing and engagement model
Standard $3,499/mo. Pro $4,500/mo. For MVP-phase work, Pro tier is usually right because cadence matters. 14-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime. 100 percent code ownership under Work Made for Hire. NDA standard. US LLC invoicing — IRS/IR35 safe. For insurtech founders building for a specific state or country, I pair with a regulatory advisor (your team or a consultant) — I handle engineering, advisor handles regulatory. Clear separation of responsibilities avoids cross-disciplinary bugs.
Case: GigEasy and bolttech
GigEasy: 3-week MVP from scratch for a Barclays and Bain Capital-backed gig-worker financial services platform (with insurance components). Stack: Laravel, React, AWS, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Pulumi. bolttech: led the Payment Service at the $1B+ unicorn, integrating 40+ providers with 99.9 percent uptime across Asia and Europe. Stack: NestJS, React, MongoDB, Redis, TypeScript. Both combine speed, integration complexity, and compliance discipline — exactly what insurtech MVPs demand. The patterns transfer directly.
When a full insurance core system is needed
For carriers running their own policy administration, claims, and underwriting, a full insurance core system (Guidewire, Duck Creek, Insurity) is the right call — these are multi-million-dollar implementations over multi-year programs. Custom work from me is not a replacement. For digital-first insurtechs, agencies, or broker-tech products, lean custom builds beat core systems in every dimension — cost, speed, flexibility. My target is founders and agency operators where custom engineering materially affects speed to market and unit economics.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Built and shipped an investor-ready MVP from scratch
Built the entire technological base and delivered MVP in just 3 weeks, enabling a successful rapid launch and investor demo.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- What about state-by-state compliance?
- State-by-state compliance is your regulatory team's responsibility. What I do: build the infrastructure to support state-specific logic (disclosures, quote logic, policy terms) without duplicating code. State-specific pages, content, and rules live in structured data your regulatory team can update without engineering. For operators launching in multiple states, this matters — a poorly-structured codebase means every state launch is a full engineering cycle. Good structure means state launches are a config change.
- How do you handle PII and PHI?
- Insurance PII is sensitive. Encrypted at rest (column-level encryption on sensitive fields), encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3), access controls per role, audit logs on every read and write. For insurtechs touching health-related data, HIPAA considerations layer on top. At bolttech and GigEasy I worked under fintech-grade compliance controls — the pattern transfers. For SOC 2 readiness, we bake in access controls, change management, and audit trails from day one.
- Can you handle e-signature?
- Yes. DocuSign, Adobe Sign, HelloSign, PandaDoc — all integrate cleanly. For insurtechs where policy documents are generated and signed as part of the customer flow, we build the generation, e-sign, and storage pipeline. Document templates live as structured data that your legal team can version. Signed documents stored in encrypted storage with retention policies. Standard work across fintech and insurtech engagements I have run.
- What about carrier sandboxes?
- Every serious carrier integration has a sandbox environment for development. I set up environment separation from day one — dev uses sandbox, staging uses sandbox or test-only live, production uses live. Sandbox credentials and data are kept separate from production; test data never touches real customers. Switching to production is a configuration change, not a code change. Applied across bolttech's 40+ provider integrations; the pattern works for any insurtech carrier stack.
- Can you help with investor due diligence?
- Yes. Technical due diligence usually involves a code review, an architecture walkthrough, and a security posture review. I prepare the artifacts investors' technical advisors will ask for — ADRs (architecture decision records), security controls list, scalability plan, cost model, roadmap, team plan. For formal code reviews, I make the code accessible and answer advisor questions directly. Clean technical diligence often accelerates fundraising by weeks.
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