- Written by the team at Aflac NI
I think we can all agree that 2020 was a year like no other. Quarantines, travel bans, lockdowns, job losses, and of course the tragic loss of loved ones experienced by many. As we contemplate what our new normal will be, hoping to put the pandemic behind us, we must also focus on days to come.
Whilst Aflac is a household name in the US and Japan, we’re still one of Northern Ireland’s newer FDIs. As a leading provider of supplemental insurance helping to protect more than 50 million people in the United States and Japan, Aflac established its Northern Ireland footprint in October 2019 when it opened its first global technology innovation centre. The new office helps power the company’s international business, delivering world-class technical expertise and emerging solutions to increase information security and support customers in their time of need.
For the Belfast team, our mission is to deliver for the customer by harnessing advances in technology and innovative approaches to problem solving at each stage of the customer life cycle. We were grateful to be able to grow significantly in 2020 and finished the year with 75 employees—well ahead of our target number of 50. Inside our office in City Quays 2 we have a mural painted with the words ‘Adaptive, Resilient and Reinventive.’ We didn’t know at the time we commissioned the artwork, which was before the global pandemic, that these words would ring so true.
“In addition to the emotional and economic toll, COVID-19 created a challenging learning experience for everyone, and in spite of the pandemic we were very fortunate to continue providing opportunity for skilled technology workers here in Northern Ireland through the hard work, adaptation and the shear resilience of the team,” said Keith Farley, vice president and managing director for Aflac NI. “From a business perspective, as more people began working from home, and seeking solutions online, it highlighted the need for companies to have seamless digital capabilities, which will help our communities in what will be the new normal. We plan to continue our growth in Belfast to meet those needs sooner rather than later.”
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While nobody wants to repeat most of the things from 2020, at Aflac Northern Ireland 2021 is a year of team growth, learning from the experiences of last year and applying them to our processes and programs for what we all hope will be better days ahead. We have significant growth across the following areas:
Cognitive Engineering
The team will be applying Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and other data-driven techniques to some of the most challenging problems in the industry. The team will draw on a variety of disciplines, including Human Factors Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Decision Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Cognitive Psychology. The focus of the team is to explore the potential for a different approach to information processing and therefore create and develop new designs to improve the human / machine interaction.
DevOps
Advancing the model from Northern Ireland means accelerating our capabilities in the DevOps space. The team will include experienced DevOps Coaches and Engineers who will spend time with development teams, leveraging DevOps tools and technologies to improve deployment and integration processes, build out CI/CD pipelines, and automate how teams promote code to production. The team will be able to dive deep into technical challenges when required, but their additional value will lie in the ability to communicate expressively with a range of audiences, from senior leaders to technical experts. They will coach and inspire others, instilling the belief that “they can do it”, and have a mindset of teaching by doing, so that others will have the confidence to do it by themselves.
Cloud Data Engineering
This team will be helping to realise the strategic vision of providing a “Data Lake in the Cloud” (if that isn’t too strange a concept). Using a range of Cloud-native technologies such as AWS, Snowflake, Kafka and Apigee, the team will expand the technical capabilities of the Data Lake, and provide a full-stack data engineering capabilities for a next-generation data layer which is used by the entire enterprise. This is a huge opportunity to influence a strategic data project, develop with the latest technologies, and provide the framework for data-driven solutions across the entire company.
Web & Mobile Development
This team will be at the centre of customer experience for Aflac for years to come. Centred around Angular and Ionic frameworks that will deliver cross-platform multi-device solutions used by Aflac’s policyholders and customers every day, the applications built by this team are crucial to delivering seamless and intelligent customer experiences. They will have a multi-disciplinary model, combining product owners, developers, test automation engineers, UX designers, and data analysts. They will ensure Aflac have a world-class platform to make the lives of our customers easier in their time of need.
All vacancies are advertised on www.aflacni.com.
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