Lead Software Engineer (Federated GraphQL)

State Farm•Richardson, TX

17h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Policy Graph team is building a GraphQL layer to unify policy data across State Farm’s lines of business and policy systems, making it available to applications, digital experiences, and AI. The team is defining schemas, engineering patterns, and architecture to support enterprise-wide access to policy data. Because policy data varies by state, line of business, and underlying system, the role will help shape a consistent, modernized data model exposed through a performant and scalable graph. The team is prototyping in TypeScript, while the production stack remains open to evaluation of TypeScript, Go, Java, or a combination based on performance, scalability, and engineering tradeoffs. The Lead Software Engineer will bring production experience with federated GraphQL to help shape the approach at enterprise scale, including entity design, schema composition and evolution, and patterns for other domains. The position works with architects, data model stewards, partner teams, policy administration system teams, consuming domains, and the GraphQL platform team. It builds federated subgraphs close to source data and owns performance against p99 targets through load testing, profiling, and tuning. This is a hybrid position assigned to the Richardson, Texas hub. Hybrid work requires approximately 40% in-office time each month, beginning in late 2027. Applicants must be immediately eligible to work lawfully in the United States; State Farm will not sponsor work authorization for this opportunity.

Requirements

At least 6 years of software engineering experience.
Production experience with federated GraphQL, including designing entities and keys and composing and evolving schemas across teams, such as with Apollo Federation or a similar technology.
A collaborative approach, including pairing, providing thoughtful code reviews, and welcoming healthy debate with teammates and partner teams.
Backend development experience in one or more of Go, Java, or Node.js/TypeScript.
Ability to learn new languages and technologies quickly.
Effective use of AI coding assistants in day-to-day work.
Experience integrating services that call other systems and handling slow or failing dependencies, for example with timeouts, retries, and batching.
Experience building for the long term with automated unit, integration, and end-to-end tests that catch regressions and keep code safe to change.

Nice To Haves

Led federated GraphQL adoption or schema governance across multiple teams.
Experience with Go GraphQL (gqlgen) or Java GraphQL (Spring for GraphQL or Netflix DGS).
Experience with Temporal or another durable workflow engine for long-running processes.
Experience diagnosing and fixing latency or throughput problems using an APM tool such as Dynatrace or OpenTelemetry.
Experience building APIs on Kubernetes or OpenShift, and AWS.
Experience with canonical or industry data models, such as ACORD.
Insurance experience.
Experience with gRPC, event-driven systems, or caching.

Responsibilities

Bring federated GraphQL expertise to the team, including entity design, schema composition and evolution, and patterns other domains can follow.
Design the Policy GraphQL schema with architects and data model stewards.
Work with architecture, consuming domains, policy administration system teams, and the GraphQL platform team.
Build federated subgraphs that read close to the source, including from databases, policy administration system APIs, or an owned read model.
Own performance against p99 targets by load testing, profiling, and tuning.

Benefits

Potential yearly incentive pay up to 15% of base salary.
Annual raise and bonus eligibility.
Health and wellbeing programs, with State Farm paying most of the healthcare premium and multiple healthcare plan options.
Medical plans provide 100% coverage for in-network preventative care.
Vision, dental, telemedicine, 24/7 mental health professionals, and other healthcare resources.
Educational benefits, including training programs and tuition assistance.
Employee resource groups and mentoring.
Fertility, IVF, and adoption assistance.
College coaching, national discount programs, financial workshops, and financial coaching.
Time off policies, with the opportunity to initially earn up to 20 days annually, plus parental leave, paid holidays, a celebration day, life leave, bereavement leave, and community service or education support days.
Matching Gift Program, Good Neighbor Grant Program, and Employee Assistance Fund.
401(k) plan with company contributions of up to 7% of salary.
Free financial advisors for retirement planning.