All part of building your career
Career growth looks different for everyone, and there is no single path into tech. At Liberty IT, employees have opportunities to learn, develop their skills and explore work that makes an impact.
Give a team three days, a real problem and the freedom to try something new, and you quickly see how they think, how they build and how they work together.
That’s what Ignite, Liberty Mutual’s global hackathon, is designed to do. This year, over 70 of our people from Belfast, Dublin and Galway travelled to Boston to take part. They joined a mixture of roles from engineers to consultants from across Liberty Mutual for three days of rapid prototyping, experimentation and problem-solving.
For many, it was a chance to step outside their usual teams, test ideas with emerging technology and see how far a concept could go in a short space of time. Here’s a look inside the experience, from the first conversations about the problem to the final pitch, through the eyes of some of the people who were there.
Among them, team LibertyClaw v2 took home the People’s Choice award and team The Locksmiths won the Technical Excellence award.
It was a proud moment for the teams, and the story behind the result says just as much about how they got there: a real problem, three days of building and a lot of learning along the way. Here’s a look inside the experience, through the eyes of some of the people who were there.
From problem to prototype in three days
Hackathons move fast, and Ignite is no exception. What starts on day one as a problem worth solving has to become something a team can demonstrate by the final pitch. In between, teams decide what they want to tackle, who they’re building for and what a useful first version could look like, then build, test and refine as they go.
This year, our teams explored how to scale AI productivity, capitalise on data and empower our teams.
Building at speed
Three days leaves little room for perfection, so teams have to make decisions quickly: what to build first, what to leave out and when to change direction. Moving from proof of concept to a working prototype in that time sharpens technical judgement and product thinking, and shows how much a small, focused team can achieve when everyone is working towards the same goal.
What people bring back
The prototypes are only part of what people bring home from Boston. Three days of building under pressure is also a fast way to develop new skills: trying a new tool or technique, pitching an idea with confidence, or seeing how people in other parts of the business approach a problem.
For early-career engineers and designers, events like Ignite offer real-world experience at speed. For more experienced team members, they’re a chance to experiment with ideas and technologies that might not yet have a place in their day-to-day work, and to bring fresh thinking back to their teams.
Where good ideas get room to grow
Ignite makes visible what happens across Liberty IT all year round. Innovation becomes real when people have the freedom to test an idea, the technical skill to build it and the collaboration to improve it quickly. It’s the kind of innovation culture that helps people grow, and a big part of why experiences like Ignite matter for tech careers here.
To everyone who took part in Ignite 2026, thank you for the curiosity, energy and craft you brought to Boston. Good ideas need room to be tested. Room to experiment. Room to build with people you might not usually work with. And room to bring what you learn back to your team, ready for whatever comes next.
