Software Engineering Lead, Affiliate Engineering

Trellis is rewriting the insurance experience from the inside out. We’re the tech company behind Savvy, our licensed insurance agency, and we’re bringing clarity and ease to a space known for… the opposite. With powerful tools, clean design, and a customer-first mindset, we’re making insurance shopping refreshingly effortless.

We’re a profitable, fast-growing Series A startup backed by General Catalyst, QED, NYCA, and Amex Ventures. As a remote-first team, we move quickly, experiment boldly, and build with intention.

If you’re craving meaningful impact, energized by ambiguity, and are ready to build alongside exceptional teammates, you’re going to love doing your best work at Trellis.

Reporting to Thomas Boquet, Head of Real-Time Bidding, the Software Engineering Lead, Affiliate Engineering will own all of our technical relationships and integrations with affiliate partners - the platforms that send us millions of leads, clicks, and calls daily - and serve as the primary technical point of contact for ensuring those partnerships are deeply integrated, high-performing, and continuously improving.

Your mission will be to ensure that our real-time bidding infrastructure:

1. Seamlessly connects with dozens of affiliate platforms, giving us access to the broadest and highest-quality inventory possible

2. Accurately and reliably receives, validates, and routes inbound data from affiliate requests through to our machine learning models

3. Maintains a high degree of integration reliability, visibility, and performance across all affiliate channels

1. Make every affiliate successful at integrating with our API

   1. By serving as a responsive, knowledgeable technical partner throughout the onboarding and integration process

   2. By systematically identifying and resolving bugs and gaps in existing integrations

2. Proactively deepen our integrations with every affiliate

   1. By evolving our API to expose richer capabilities and unlock more inventory

   2. By collaborating directly with affiliate partners to identify and act on opportunities to expand the volume and quality of traffic we receive

3. Build visibility and confidence in our data pipeline

   1. By documenting, understanding, and monitoring the full data flow from inbound API requests through to our machine learning models

   2. By proactively tracking integration performance and surfacing issues before they become business problems

1. Extensive Backend Engineering Experience – This role is nearly entirely backend focused. You should be comfortable exercising best practices in Python/FastAPI, working with high-throughput real-time systems, and deploying and operating services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

2. Communication Skills – You will work extensively with external affiliate partners, making clear and professional written and verbal communication essential. You'll need good judgment for navigating technical conversations with partners of varying sophistication and organizational complexity.

3. Process Orientation & Multitasking – You will be responsible for many simultaneous workstreams: active integrations, in-flight debugging, API evolution projects, and ongoing partner relationships. You'll need to design and maintain right-sized processes to keep everything on track without dropping balls.

4. Detail Orientation – Real-time bidding is an unforgiving environment where a single malformed field or misconfigured parameter can silently degrade performance or revenue. An extraordinary eye for detail is essential.

5. QA Mindset – You will be expected to build and maintain robust testing and validation practices to ensure integrations behave correctly end-to-end, especially as we scale to more affiliates and more inventory types.

6. Domain Knowledge (a Plus) – Familiarity with the insurance industry and/or real-time bidding ecosystems (leads, clicks, calls) will meaningfully accelerate your ability to make good decisions and earn credibility with partners.

We’re a group of curious, mission-driven humans rewriting the insurance experience and having a lot of fun along the way. At Trellis, you’ll make a real impact on a product millions rely on, and grow alongside a company that’s scaling fast.

✨ A transparent, collaborative culture where ideas win, not titles
🚀 Big opportunities to take ownership and chart your growth
💰 Competitive compensation (75th+ percentile)
🏡 Fully remote across the US & Canada
🎉 Quarterly virtual and/or in-person events that keep us connected

🌴 Flexible vacation (yes, actually flexible)
🩺 100% employer-paid health insurance for employees
💻 Home office budget to create your perfect setup
🧘 Wellness programming, because balance matters
💸 401(k) and HSA contributions, FSAs, bonuses & equity opportunities
🐣 Paid parental leave

👉 If you want a role where you’ll grow, be trusted, and build something that genuinely improves people’s lives, Trellis is the place. Join us.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Note: all employees must complete a background check prior to starting employment with Trellis or its subsidiaries