State Auto

We're a 100-year-old insurance company that's in the process of re-inventing itself as a tech company that happens to sell insurance. Our team is at the front of this transformation: we develop proofs of concept and prototypes to evaluate technologies and techniques that can make State Auto better and faster, and at a lower cost, in support of our internal and external customers. The sort of core mantra for our group is to fail fast and fail forward: we recognize that a lot of what we do will not be a fit for the company and might never progress beyond the PoC stage. That makes throughput really critical for us: our typical PoC concludes within about 4—6 weeks. Sometimes this is an evaluation of a vendored product, most times it's building out our own in-house solution from FOSS components.