Application Engineering Manager

Great American Insurance Company•Cincinnati, OH

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Agent & Insured Digital Experience (AIE) team is seeking a results-oriented Application Engineering Supervisor to provide people leadership, technical guidance, and day-to-day delivery support for a team of application engineers. The team supports Great American’s externally facing Agent and Insured Portals, which provide digital self-service experiences for agents and policyholders. This hybrid role combines in-office and remote work, with an expectation of meaningful on-site presence to support collaboration, relationship building, and business success. This is a working leadership position that combines direct people management with hands-on application engineering. The supervisor coordinates team priorities, coaches and develops engineers, promotes strong engineering practices, and contributes to technical delivery and problem-solving. Work may include application design, development, pair programming, code review, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support, helping deliver quality outcomes from feature definition through ongoing sustainment. The role partners with product leaders, the Delivery Manager, Technical Product Managers, architects, and cross-functional delivery teams to translate business priorities into secure, reliable, maintainable, and production-ready technology solutions. It operates under established policies, procedures, engineering standards, and organizational direction with limited oversight, balancing business and customer needs, delivery commitments, technical quality, team capacity, production support, and operational risk.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
At least six years of experience in software development, software engineering, and/or application engineering.
Experience providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers, coordinating software delivery, or serving in an Anchor, team-lead, or comparable leadership capacity.
Hands-on experience designing, developing, testing, deploying, and supporting Java-based microservices.
Strong experience with Java and Spring Boot.
Experience building and integrating RESTful APIs and distributed applications.
Experience applying software engineering practices across the full software development lifecycle, including automated testing, code review, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
Experience applying secure software development practices, including identity, authentication, authorization, data privacy, vulnerability remediation, and security controls.
People leadership, coaching, and employee-development skills.
Advanced proficiency in application engineering, technical leadership, and sound engineering judgment.
Knowledge of Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming.
Skills in requirements analysis and identifying technical gaps, dependencies, risks, and edge cases.
Knowledge of software testing, quality engineering, CI/CD, release management, deployment, validation, recovery, and production-readiness practices.
Knowledge of application performance, observability, logging, telemetry, synthetic monitoring, incident response, production troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
Knowledge of security, data privacy, risk management, and responsible AI usage.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, prioritization, organizational, and time-management skills.
Clear and effective communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Ability to see the big picture while maintaining focus on delivery details.
Adaptability, continuous learning, customer focus, and results orientation.
Advanced technical proficiency across Java, Spring Boot, microservices, RESTful APIs, distributed systems, integrations, cloud platforms, databases, automated testing, observability, security, and production-support practices.
Understanding of machine learning and generative AI concepts and their implications for software engineering, security, privacy, quality, and maintainability.

Nice To Haves

Previous formal experience supervising an Application Engineering or software development team.
Experience supporting externally facing portals, digital self-service applications, or other high-availability customer experiences.
Property and Casualty insurance or other relevant insurance-industry experience.
Experience with Vue.js, React, or similar modern front-end frameworks.
Experience deploying and operating containerized applications using Kubernetes.
Experience developing reactive Java applications and microservices using Spring WebFlux.
Experience building event-driven integrations and distributed systems.
Experience with Azure, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Tanzu Application Service, or comparable cloud and application-platform technologies.
Experience with SQL Server, Oracle, Snowflake, or similar relational and cloud data technologies.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git-based development, automated testing, feature flags, and modern release practices.
Experience with application observability, synthetic monitoring, centralized logging, and performance-analysis tools.
Experience using Rally or a similar Agile development tracking tool.
Experience using GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, OpenAI technologies, or similar AI-enabled engineering tools.

Responsibilities

Coordinate the daily operations and priorities of the Application Engineering team to support efficient, predictable delivery.
Supervise, coach, mentor, and develop application engineers; provide feedback and participate in talent selection, recognition, development, and performance-management decisions.
Provide day-to-day technical direction, reinforce engineering standards, facilitate collaboration, and contribute hands-on to application design, development, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support when appropriate.
Lead and contribute to the design, development, integration, testing, deployment, maintenance, and evolution of applications and systems supporting business and insurance processes.
Review technical specifications, feature requirements, and acceptance criteria to identify gaps, dependencies, risks, edge cases, and implementation considerations before development begins.
Guide and review technical decisions, code, and deliverables involving architecture, implementation patterns, APIs, integrations, data flow, error handling, security, performance, scalability, testability, maintainability, and operational support.
Collaborate with development, operations, product, quality assurance, architecture, and business teams to design and implement solutions that improve interoperability, delivery outcomes, operational effectiveness, and user experience.
Promote pair programming, code review, shared problem-solving, knowledge transfer, and collective code ownership.
Ensure software changes include risk- and complexity-appropriate testing, documentation, security controls, logging, monitoring, error handling, deployment planning, and recovery considerations.
Coordinate with Quality Assurance, Release Management, Production Support, architecture, and other partners on release planning, implementation, validation, post-release monitoring, and applicable release, support, and recovery artifacts.
Monitor application performance and reliability, promoting logging, telemetry, performance and synthetic monitoring, and actionable alerting.
Provide technical leadership during complex application issues and production incidents, including triage, mitigation, troubleshooting, recovery, root-cause analysis, and preventive follow-up.
Communicate delivery progress, technical concerns, blockers, resource constraints, dependencies, and risks clearly and early; escalate issues appropriately.
Identify and implement improvements to engineering practices, delivery processes, documentation, automation, testing, release management, and production support.
Identify technical debt, application risks, and modernization opportunities, and work with management, architects, and product partners on pragmatic solutions.
Support adherence to software development lifecycle practices, security baselines, architectural standards, data privacy requirements, change management processes, and operational controls.
Use AI-powered tools responsibly for software development, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, process analysis, and data interpretation, with appropriate human review and compliance with company policies on privacy, security, intellectual property, and responsible AI.
Help ensure the team meets delivery, quality, performance, operational, and budget expectations.
Perform other duties as assigned.