A digital insurance manager on AWS

From 2016 to December 2021 I worked at Policen Direkt in Frankfurt, a company in the German secondary market for life insurance. I was project manager and web developer for the web portals of the group. From 2018 I also set up and managed their infrastructure on AWS.

The insurance manager

With colleagues I built a digital insurance manager: a portal in which thousands of customers upload and manage their insurance policies (customer count from the years 2016 to 2021). Customers can also order products of external partners in it. I programmed the front end in Angular, designed the interfaces and connected the portal to the existing CRM system. I managed the project as well, with Scrum and Jira.

Life insurance portals

I designed and programmed systems that administer and present study results on life insurance: sources of income, profit sharing, solvency ratios and status reports. For this work I was in direct contact with the chief actuary.

AWS in Frankfurt and London

From 2018 I ran the portals on AWS, in the regions Frankfurt and London. I worked with EC2, S3, VPCs and CloudWatch almost every day. Counted across AWS and, in my next job, Azure, I set up at least 20 production and test servers between 2018 and 2024, with autoscaling, load balancing, DNS failover and content distribution. I hold the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certificates; see teaching and certifications.

For monitoring I set up the evaluation of logs and notifications in the event of an error. Applications were tested automatically in the front end and in the back end.

I also managed more than 100 top-level domains for the group (2016 to 2021) and coordinated the work between marketing, management, product development and external partners.

The stack

From 2018 I used Angular or jQuery in the front end and .NET Core with Entity Framework in the back end, on the ASP.NET Boilerplate framework with TypeScript, Bootstrap 4 and SCSS. I have used Docker containers since 2019. For the group’s websites I used WordPress from 2016, through several launches and relaunches.

In 2018 TU Dresden named the online guide of Policen Direkt the insurance blog of the year. The guide is one of the group’s websites from my time there.

What a company gets from this

A company in a regulated industry gets someone who has built the customer portal, the specialist portals and the cloud infrastructure under them, and who has spoken with the actuary and with marketing about the same system. The infrastructure side continued in my next job: Node operations and a cloud migration with failover.