. NET Specialist Software Engineering

Transamerica • Cedar Rapids, IA

1d • $141,000 - $165,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Specialist Software Engineer sets the technical direction for the design, development, and operational hardening of business-critical backend services built on C# and the .NET Framework. This role is the organization's authority on multi-threaded Windows Service design, service stability and recovery, and the diagnosis of complex production issues. The Specialist takes ownership of inherited, high-risk services and brings them to enterprise standards for reliability, observability, recoverability, and auditability — establishing the patterns, standards, and reference designs that raise engineering quality across teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, math, engineering, or other technical field, or equivalent experience.
• Six years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial, demonstrable depth in C# and the .NET Framework (4.x). This role is primarily legacy service engineering, not greenfield.
• Deep, hands-on multithreading and concurrency expertise: thread lifecycle management, synchronization primitives (Monitor, lock, volatile, Interlocked, ManualResetEvent/AutoResetEvent), and the diagnosis of deadlocks, race conditions, and resource contention.
• Production experience building and operating Windows Services (ServiceBase, Service Control Manager, InstallUtil/ProjectInstaller, OnStart/OnStop lifecycle correctness, Windows Event Log).
• Proven track record diagnosing and permanently resolving intermittent production failures — service hangs, memory exhaustion, and stability issues — with clear root-cause analysis.
• Five years of experience with SQL Server at an advanced engineering level: transactions, isolation levels, concurrency, deadlock prevention/retry/resolution, execution-plan analysis, indexing, and connection resiliency. Strong understanding of relational design techniques and philosophies (RDBMS, normalization, star/Kimball for reporting).
• Experience establishing data-access standards with LLBLGen or a comparable ORM (Entity Framework or similar).
• Expertise with core engineering tooling: Visual Studio, Git/Bitbucket, SQL Server Management Studio, NUnit (or comparable), and build/deployment pipelines.
• Strong design discipline: service-oriented architecture, dependency injection, OOD/OOP, and clean separation of concerns.
• Ability to operate independently from a problem statement with minimal direction, make and document sound engineering decisions, verify work against requirements, and leave code and documentation more maintainable than found.
• Attention to detail and results orientation with a strong customer and operational-reliability focus.
• Analytical and problem-solving skills, and the ability to present technical information to all levels of the organization.
• Ability to prioritize workload to meet tight deadlines, both as part of a team and independently.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree.
• Knowledge of the financial services or insurance industry (ACORD, commissions, or regulated audit requirements).
• Experience operating under formal change management and L3 production support models.
• Experience with observability tooling (AppDynamics, Splunk, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch) and a clear understanding of why application-owned instrumentation remains necessary.
• Exposure to messaging and integration technologies (MQ, Kafka, API gateways, FTP/SFTP/NDM) and delivery-guarantee/dead-letter patterns.
• Exposure to cloud services (AWS/Azure), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines).
• Technology or platform certifications (e.g., Microsoft, AWS).
• Familiarity with REST/API development (ASP.NET Web API) and modern frontend frameworks is a plus but not central to this role.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and lead the architecture, design, development, deployment, and operational support of business-critical Windows Services using C# and .NET Framework 4.8.
• Serve as the organization's subject-matter expert for multi-threaded application design, establishing patterns and resolving the most complex issues involving Monitor, volatile, Interlocked, ManualResetEvent, synchronization, and thread lifecycle management.
• Lead diagnosis and resolution of high-impact production issues involving concurrency, service stability, performance, memory usage, and resource contention; define systemic improvements that prevent recurrence. Drive issues to documented root cause rather than mitigation by restart.
• Design and establish self-managing service patterns: startup pre-flight validation before a service reports healthy, master-orchestration and worker-thread models, heartbeat monitoring and dead-thread recovery, failure thresholds with controlled escalation, and documented, visible blocked states in place of silent hangs.
• Define the transaction-integrity model for data entering our systems — received, persisted, then processed — with dead-letter handling and recoverable, replayable processing so that in-flight work is never lost.
• Provide technical authority for SQL Server design and performance, including execution-plan analysis, indexing strategies, isolation levels, concurrency, and deadlock prevention, detection, retry, and resolution. Establish connection-resiliency and bounded-memory data-access standards.
• Establish data-access architecture and engineering standards using LLBLGen or comparable object-relational mapping frameworks.
• Define deployment, configuration, monitoring, and operational practices for Windows Services using Windows Event Log, Service Control Manager, InstallUtil/ProjectInstaller, and related tooling. Design application-owned observability — queryable health, backlog and queue-depth visibility, and end-to-end traceability for L3 support.
• Create and govern technical standards, reusable patterns, reference designs, runbooks, and documentation for complex application and service changes across multiple teams or initiatives.
• Influence product, architecture, engineering, and support stakeholders to align technology decisions with reliability, scalability, maintainability, security, cost, and business outcomes.
• Lead design and code reviews for the highest-risk work, raise engineering quality across teams, and mentor senior developers and other technical professionals.
• Evaluate and resolve ambiguous, cross-functional technical challenges with significant operational or business impact, making authoritative recommendations to technology leadership.
• Anticipate technology risks and modernization needs, define multi-year improvement strategies, and lead adoption of new tools and frameworks with minimal oversight.

Benefits

• Competitive Pay
• Bonus for Eligible Employees
• Benefits Package
• Pension Plan
• 401k Match
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Disability Insurance
• Medical Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Employee Discounts
• Career Training & Development Opportunities
• Paid Time Off starting at 160 hours annually for employees in their first year of service.
• Ten (10) paid holidays per year (typically mirroring the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) holidays).
• Be Well Company holistic wellness program, which includes Wellness Coaching and Reward Dollars
• Parental Leave – fifteen (15) days of paid parental leave per calendar year to eligible employees with at least one year of service at the time of birth, placement of an adopted child, or placement of a foster care child.
• Adoption Assistance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Back-Up Care Program
• PTO for Volunteer Hours
• Employee Matching Gifts Program
• Employee Resource Groups
• Inclusion and Diversity Programs
• Employee Recognition Program
• Referral Bonus Programs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior