Job Description

Who are we?

Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries.

People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

Role Purpose

The Strategic Data & Analytics team builds the analytical products that support growth across Howden Employee Benefits. We are a business-embedded team that works directly alongside consultants, client directors and project teams, rather than operating within a traditional technology or IT function. Our products are used every day by colleagues across the UK business and by our clients to support better decision-making, solve complex challenges and deliver stronger outcomes.

This role keeps those products working and their users served, contributes to building the next ones, and owns how work moves through the team. You will be the first point of contact for users of our live products, you will own the backlog and the delivery and governance process, and you will build alongside the rest of the team on a defined set of firm-wide analytical products. Our approach is simple: build fewer things, build them fast, and build them once so they can be used many times.

It is also an unusually fast way to acquire breadth. You will work across Python, Shiny, Quarto, git, Azure DevOps, containerised deployment and infrastructure-as-code inside a single small team, on products with real users and a proper development lifecycle, rather than seeing one part of one stack. Where that leads is open. It may be deeper ownership of how our products run and scale, the build and engineering side of the team, or a direction of your own that we have not yet thought of. Howden is an entrepreneurial firm, and in this team growth happens in our daily work, not in an annual review.This is not a software engineering role and it is not an IT role. We are a consulting team that is proficient with technology.

Location is flexible, with home-based or local Howden office-based both available according to preference. The team itself is distributed across home and several Howden offices and works together primarily over Teams rather than in one room. Our closeness to the business is organisational rather than geographic.

Key Accountabilities

• Work directly with consultants and client directors, who are both our users and our route to the business.
• Support our live analytical products and the people who use them: triaging questions, requests and changes, resolving what you can, and scheduling the rest.
• Own the team’s delivery process: backlog management in Azure DevOps, change and release discipline, and running the governance and approval process on which delivery depends.
• Maintain the documentation, records and evidence that the team’s governance, reporting and assurance obligations require.
• Contribute to the build of new products and to the team’s reusable components, libraries and templates.
• Contribute to the development of the team’s internal delivery and deployment platform.

Skills & Experience

The first question is whether this is the right environment for you.

• You have a consulting mindset and enjoy working across a wide variety of problems.
• You enjoy helping colleagues and senior leaders make better decisions, and you see data, analytics and visualisation as your tools for bringing that about.
• You are the kind of person who finishes things, keeps records straight and does not let an unanswered request sit. The team’s ability to build depends on this role holding the process.
• You support the people around you, in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges. You share what you learn, you would rather have an honest conversation than a comfortable one, and you build your own network across the business. In a small team we succeed together, and nothing we build succeeds unless the business succeeds with it.
• You take ownership of your decisions, your actions and your outputs.
• You are comfortable with uncertainty and speed, and are interested rather than frustrated by new problems with incomplete and ambiguous information.
• You can work in a fast-growing firm where processes, systems and structures are still being brought together, and where parts of the environment are incomplete.
• You are effective in a distributed team. Most of our collaboration, with each other and with the business, happens over Teams, with colleagues you will meet in person occasionally rather than daily. If you do your best work by turning to the person beside you, this will be a difficult environment.

Technical experience:

• Evidence of analytical or data work that other people actually relied on.
• Experience of supporting users of something you or your team built, and of handling the requests and changes that follow.
• Experience maintaining documentation, governance processes and delivery records.
• Working experience of Python, and of some of the rest of our stack or close equivalents: Shiny or another interactive analytical UI framework, Quarto or similar reporting tooling, git, Azure DevOps or another pipeline and work-tracking platform. We expect some of these, not all, and a clear appetite to pick up the remainder quickly.

You must be able to build without AI coding agents. We do not use them for coding. You will read, write, debug and review code yourself, and be able to explain all of it. If any material part of how you work today depends on agent-assisted or “vibe” coding, this is not the role for you, and we would rather you knew that before applying.

Experience of Employee Benefits, Pensions or Insurance is not required.

What do we offer in return?

A career that you define. At Howden, we value diversity – there is no one Howden type. Instead, we’re looking for individuals who share the same values as us:

• Our successes have all come from someone brave enough to try something new
• We support each other in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges
• We are determined to make a positive difference at work and beyond

Reasonable adjustments

We're committed to providing reasonable accommodations at Howden to ensure that our positions align well with your needs. Besides the usual adjustments such as software, IT, and office setups, we can also accommodate other changes such as flexible hours* or hybrid working*.

If you're excited by this role but have some doubts about whether it’s the right fit for you, send us your application – if your profile fits the role’s criteria, we will be in touch to assist in helping to get you set up with any reasonable adjustments you may require.

*Not all positions can accommodate changes to working hours or locations. Reach out to your Recruitment Partner if you want to know more.

Permanent