Application Engineering Manager

Great American Insurance Group•Cincinnati, OH

17h•Hybrid

About The Position

Great American Insurance Group’s Property & Casualty IT Services supports business units and corporate functions with technology services and solutions. The Agent & Insured Digital Experience team maintains externally facing Agent and Insured Portals that provide digital self-service experiences for agents and policyholders. The role is described in the posting as an Application Engineering Supervisor. It is a working leadership position combining direct people management with hands-on application engineering. The supervisor coordinates team priorities and daily delivery, coaches and develops application engineers, reinforces engineering practices, and partners with product leaders, the Delivery Manager, Technical Product Managers, architects, and cross-functional teams to deliver secure, reliable, maintainable, production-ready solutions. The supervisor may participate in application design, development, pair programming, code review, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support. The role operates under established policies, procedures, engineering standards, and organizational direction with limited oversight. It is a hybrid position combining in-office and remote work, with an expectation of meaningful on-site presence. The position is not eligible for employment visa sponsorship; applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field/experience.
Generally, 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 with Java, Spring Boot, microservices, RESTful APIs, integrations, databases, application architecture, and modern development frameworks.
Knowledge of Agile software development methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming.
Skills in pair programming, code review, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem-solving.
Ability to analyze requirements and identify 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 communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, including the ability to communicate with technical and nontechnical audiences.
Ability to see the big picture while maintaining focus on delivery details, adapt, learn continuously, and remain customer- and results-oriented.
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 with GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, OpenAI technologies, or similar AI-enabled engineering tools.

Responsibilities

Coordinate the Application Engineering team’s daily operations, priorities, workflows, and delivery.
Directly supervise, coach, mentor, and provide feedback and professional development support to application engineers; participate in talent selection, recognition, development, and performance-management decisions.
Provide day-to-day technical direction and contribute to application design, development, integration, testing, deployment, maintenance, troubleshooting, and production support.
Lead and support delivery of software applications and systems for business and insurance processes.
Review technical specifications, feature requirements, and acceptance criteria to identify gaps, dependencies, risks, edge cases, and implementation considerations.
Guide and review technical decisions, code, and deliverables related to architecture, implementation patterns, APIs, integrations, data flow, security, performance, scalability, testability, maintainability, and operational support.
Promote collaboration across development, operations, product, quality assurance, architecture, and business teams.
Encourage pair programming, code review, shared problem-solving, knowledge transfer, and collective code ownership.
Ensure software changes receive testing appropriate to their risk and complexity and include necessary documentation, security controls, logging, monitoring, error handling, deployment planning, and recovery considerations.
Coordinate with Quality Assurance, Release Management, Production Support, architecture, and other delivery partners on release planning, implementation, validation, post-release monitoring, and applicable release, support, and recovery artifacts.
Monitor application performance and reliability and promote 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.
Identify and help implement improvements to engineering practices, delivery processes, documentation, automation, testing, release management, and production support.
Identify technical debt, application risks, and modernization opportunities and recommend pragmatic solutions with management, architects, and product partners.
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, maintaining human review and complying with company policies.
Balance supervisory responsibilities with hands-on technical participation, support delivery and complex issue resolution, maintain technical proficiency, and help develop team capabilities.
Help ensure the team meets delivery, quality, performance, operational, and budget expectations; escalate issues appropriately.
Perform other duties as assigned.