SafetyWing careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

SafetyWing has raised about $47M. After Y Combinator in 2018 came a €3M seed in summer 2019, then an $8M Series A in January 2021 led by Creandum with byFounders and Rocketship.vc, when the company had 35 staff, and a $35M Series B in April 2022 led by Kinnevik, the Swedish investment group, with Creandum, byFounders, Mundi Ventures, DG Ventures and CE Innovation Capital participating. No round has been announced since, and no valuation has been published. On revenue, the head of marketing said in July 2026 that the company does "tens of millions of dollars" a year, and the General Manager posting for Nomad Insurance puts that product line alone at $30M with a target of $300M.

SafetyWing sells insurance to people whose lives cross borders. Nomad Essential is its original travel medical insurance and still its main revenue driver, Nomad Complete is full health insurance for digital nomads, and Nomad Citizen, launched in July 2026, bundles health coverage, travel protection, income protection, parental and sick leave, life insurance and visa assistance into one membership for people who spend more than half the year outside their home country. Remote Health is the B2B side: one group health policy that covers a company's employees and contractors in 175+ countries.

The stated mission is bigger than insurance: "a global social safety net for remote workers, simple health, insurance and retirement products designed to replace national welfare systems", and in the long run the first country on the internet. The company came out of Y Combinator's W18 batch, was founded in Oslo in 2018, and has been fully remote since day one. Its Trustpilot rating stood at 4.2 out of 5 across 3,171 customer reviews in March 2026.

Sondre Rasch, CEO and co-founder. Co-founded Konsus, now Superside (YC W16), the freelance design platform, in 2015 and left in 2017 to build the safety net its freelancers could not get anywhere. Before that he was a policy advisor in the Norwegian Parliament on labour and social policy (2014 to 2015), a member of Bergen city council from 2011 to 2015 after running a campaign at 20 that got seven young people elected, and a Civita fellow. BSc and MSc in Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), with computer science courses at the University of Bergen and an entrepreneurship programme at UC Berkeley in 2012. Hosts the company's Building Remotely podcast.

Sarah Sandnes, CTO and co-founder. Built SafetyWing's initial backend and chose its stack after working as a programmer first in corporate roles and then as lead engineer at the London ad-tech startup Tapdaq until its Series A. Born in 1987 in Norway, she left in 2014 and has lived in London, Santiago, Berlin, Nashville and San Francisco before settling in New York. BSc and MSc in mathematics and computer science from the University of Oslo, plus the Entrepreneurship and New Ventures programme at UC Berkeley in 2012. Also a musician.

Hans Nyvold Kjellby, COO and co-founder. A lawyer who was head of legal at Auka, the Norwegian white-label mobile payments company, before SafetyWing, where in the early days he was "the lawyer dealing with our insurance partners" while Rasch talked to customers and Sandnes wrote the backend. Master's degree in Law from the University of Bergen.

SafetyWing is one of the few companies where the product and the workplace are the same idea. The team has never had an office, many of its people are full-time nomads, and staff are covered by the company's own Global Safety Net (worldwide health, income and travel coverage) plus travel insurance whenever they leave their home country. Joey Flores, Head of Marketing, wrote from a cafe in Patagonia in November 2025: "I have NEVER worked for a company that invests at this level to ensure an incredible company culture."

The scope on offer is unusual for a company of this size. The current General Manager role hands one person the whole Nomad Insurance line, three products at three stages of maturity (a $30M core product, a "Series A stage" health plan and an MVP-stage safety net product), with the brief to take it from $30M to $300M. Nomad Citizen, the income protection and citizenship product, only went live in July 2026, so the company is still building the thing it was founded to build rather than maintaining it.

Retention is a data point the company likes to cite: 97% over five years as of 2023, and "through the roof" in the head of marketing's words in 2026.

Every posting lists the same six traits SafetyWing hires for: people who want to help build a global social safety net on the internet, who "think for themselves instead of copying others", who are "willing to try new things, even with the risk of failure", who are intellectually curious, "creative and bold in the face of any problems", and who "have strong integrity and do the right thing". CEO Sondre Rasch describes the values as "based on timeless universal principles" and names authenticity as the one that makes remote work function; his line on trust is that it "is not something you can impose or input into the system. Instead, it's an output."

Management is by output, and the two outputs the company says it measures are joy and productivity. Rasch: "We have this incredible focus on joy and productivity. That's sort of the outputs we measure," and "We want everything in the company to be joyful and productive. And it turns out that's totally possible." Goals are set bottom-up: everyone brainstorms company goals solo, the group merges the list, and each person ranks ideas by expected customer impact and how excited the team is to build them, on the stated belief that "the group is smarter than the individual, when the group has the right processes in place." The product roadmap is public.

Pay was, for years, the company's most radical policy. WIRED reported in May 2023 that all 68 full-time employees across 60 countries, including the CEO, CFO, graphic designer and software engineers, earned exactly the same salary, a practice inspired by Norway's flat-salary society and in place since founding, with company-wide raises of about 10% each time a pre-agreed revenue milestone was hit. Rasch's defence: "is it fair to pay someone who lives in a poorer part of town a lower salary? No." That model has since given way to per-role bands: current postings on Y Combinator list different ranges for different roles.

SafetyWing's interview process has five to six stages: conversations with the recruiting team, the hiring manager, team members and the founders, plus "a chance to showcase your skills in practice", which the FAQ refers to as test tasks. Expect about one interview a week, 6 to 8 weeks end to end, an update within 3 to 5 days of each interview, and one to two weeks for feedback on the initial application; everyone who applies gets an answer. Stages run in parallel where possible, and a small group of finalists goes into the final round. After it the hiring team syncs on "skills, creativity, values, and connection to our mission". Some roles carry deadlines: the current Product Engineer posting closes 24 September 2026.

The company's own advice is that interviews are conversation-based and need no special preparation: be authentic, communicate clearly rather than perfectly, show original thinking, and ask thoughtful questions. Mission alignment is screened explicitly; Rasch said in 2020 that "one of the primary things we look at is that they want the same thing we do", and that being pro remote work or a digital nomad yourself is "a very good sign". Using AI to refine wording or check grammar in applications is fine, but the recruiting team says it wants answers that are specific and personal. All candidate communication runs through Pinpoint, and you can register interest to join the talent pipeline when nothing fits.