20210325_linkedin_meet_the_tech_team

The digitalization of the insurance business is exciting

Who are the faces behind Friendsurance's tech platform and innovations? Meet our IT team in a new interview series! In the third episode, we are talking with Fábio Serra, Engineering Manager, whose job is to make sure the engineers have all conditions to perform: remove any blockers, improve their skills and assist in technical architecture and design decisions.

Since when are you with Friendsurance?

I've been working with Friendsurance for the past 5 years and I have enjoyed every year of it.

 

Where do you currently work – in the office, in home office or somewhere else? What do you prefer?

Currently, I'm working remotely from home. I do prefer to work like this since I have more time with my family. It has been working very well with our teams at Friendsurance. But, as soon as possible, I would like to go at least twice a week to the office to have direct contact with my colleagues, too.

 

What is your responsibility at Friendsurance? What is the most interesting part of your job?

As Engineering Manager of three teams, my responsibility is to make sure the engineers have all conditions to perform well, remove any blockers, improve their skills and also assist in technical architecture and design decisions. I'm also part of our "IT on-call rotation" group who takes care of any incidents in production environments as well as permissions management. I like too, when there is time, to pair with the engineers and do code reviews.

 

What was the biggest challenge you have solved in your job so far?

The challenges we face in day-to-day business become much easier due to the fact that we have a very good team, very capable of dealing with them.

One example of a big challenge we had many years ago was to transform our infrastructure into code. This helped us in being able to reproduce environments, have a consistency of configurations, improve security, save costs, perform code reviews, create a DevOps culture in the company, share knowledge, and much more.

 

What do you like the most about working at Friendsurance?

The people working in the company are the best part of it. It really makes you willing to work, giving your best. Everybody supports each other and is very friendly. We have a very good multicultural environment with people from many different countries.

 

How did you find your way to the Insurtech space?

Before joining Friendsurance, I already worked with a number of insurance companies for some years, among others in Brazil. Despite my previous knowledge, I have learned even more about the combination of insurance and tech with Friendsurance. That's the great thing about Friendsurance: The company gives us the opportunity to get to know a ton of new things. There are no limits, we have access to all experts in the area.

 

What do you believe are the most exciting innovations and impactful technologies in the Insurtech space?

I believe that the most exciting is the digitalization of the insurance business. More and more people will no longer be forced to deal with mountains of paper documents, the processes will be faster and more efficient and artificial intelligence will advise people about new insurances that they can take advantage of.

 

What fascinates you about Digital Bancassurance?

What fascinates me is the direction that Bancassurance is going towards making insurance management more integrated with normal bank services and also using AI to identify opportunities of new insurances analyzing bank transactions which we can receive by customer approval via PSD2 compliant APIs.

 

From your perspective what are the greatest strengths of Friendsurance as a tech company?

The greatest strengths are that we have a great capability of bringing new architectures, technologies and are able to evaluate well how to create solutions using them. Our teams are cross-functional which means that we share knowledge and give opportunities to every member to work in all areas of software engineering.

 

Are you using advanced architectures in the Friendsurance tech team?

Yes. For example, we built what we called “Microservice Platform” which is a set of tools, infrastructures, and pipelines that enable our teams to develop, test, and release microservices.

 

How do you prepare yourself for an AI-centric world?

I try to take advantage of and consume any AI solution that helps my life to become easier. In my opinion, anything that could support me and give me time for other important things, for example, time with my family, is a lifesaver. Friendsurance is always thinking in this direction.

 

Learn more about the Friendsurance Tech Team! 

JOIN FRIENDSURANCE TODAY!

Being part of the Friendsurance team means thinking new every day. We are bringing two worlds together: customer centric technical innovation and the insurance business.