Senior Software Engineer

Security Benefit•Overland Park, KS

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead, on the New Annuity Products team, you are the technical throughline for the product. You take business requirements, assess what the vendor system can and can’t do, identify which internal platforms are affected, and produce the architecture for how these pieces work together to deliver the product. You partner directly with Financial Products leadership, the vendor's engineering and product teams, and other internal platform teams as a technical peer, and you set the technical direction for the solution architecture and for the team's growing set of deployment and testing tooling. This is a leadership and strategy role first. You will occasionally write code — to prototype a solution, evaluate a vendor capability, or step in on a hard problem — but your primary output is sound architecture, clear decisions, well-run process, and a team that ships new and enhanced annuity products quickly and reliably. The Senior Software Engineer position reports to the Senior Manager, Platform Engineering and can be based out of our home in Topeka or Overland Park, Kansas, Des Moines, Iowa, or remotely for the right candidate. We work a hybrid schedule, offering flexibility to work both remotely and on-site.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
Minimum 7 years of experience in software engineering or technical leadership, including significant prior hands-on development experience — you understand the craft deeply even though this role is not primarily a coding role.
Demonstrated experience providing architectural oversight of vendor-built or third-party platforms and their integrations, rather than only building integrations yourself.
Track record of running vendor / software evaluations: technical due diligence, build-versus-buy and build-versus-configure analysis, and recommendations to leadership.
Experience owning a product or platform roadmap and leading quarterly planning cycles for an engineering team.
Experience with release management, and with standing up or improving testing coordination and test automation practices.
Experience defining and executing a technical debt reduction strategy across a platform or product line.
Working knowledge of full-stack, cloud-native architecture (TypeScript / React, REST integration, SQL / data, AWS) sufficient to guide design decisions and speak credibly with engineers and vendors, even if you are not writing production code day-to-day.
Comfort collaborating directly with external vendor engineering and product teams as a technical peer.
Track record of quickly learning new domains, tools, and vendor platforms, and of using AI-assisted approaches to improve efficiency and quality.

Nice To Haves

Insurance, annuity, or retirement domain experience strongly preferred: familiarity with policy administration concepts such as surrender charges, MVA, living-benefit riders (GLWB), free-corridor withdrawals, and policy transactions.
Experience with a vendor policy administration platform (for example, FAST, wmA, OIPA, or comparable) a strong plus.
Financial services or other regulated-industry experience preferred.

Responsibilities

Partner with business and product stakeholders to understand needs, ask the right clarifying questions, and translate requirements into workable technical solutions.
Own the solution architecture for how the vendor-built policy administration system and Security Benefit’s internal platforms work together to deliver new annuity products, ensuring designs are sound, scalable, and consistent with the system of record.
Influence and guide design decisions with the vendor’s engineering team and with internal platform teams, without necessarily writing the implementation yourself.
Continually look for opportunities to automate manual processes at the seams between the vendor system and internal platforms — deployment packaging, testing, and operational handoffs — to reduce toil and improve reliability.
Document existing processes, integration behavior, and system architecture across the vendor system and internal platforms, and define the future-state solution architecture and roadmap.
Facilitate the integration of internal systems and third-party / vendor solutions, acting as the connective tissue between teams.
Own the solution architecture roadmap for how the vendor system and internal platforms come together to deliver new annuity products, balancing business priorities, technical dependencies, and vendor constraints.
Lead software and vendor selection: run technical due diligence, evaluate build-versus-buy and build-versus-configure trade-offs, and make recommendations to leadership.
Own release and deployment coordination across the vendor system and internal platforms — including the team’s own deployment tooling — covering planning, sequencing, and coordination across internal and vendor teams.
Support QA’s testing effort by building test automation into the architecture — designing the seams between the vendor system and internal platforms so they’re testable, and equipping QA with the tooling to validate integration points.
Identify, prioritize, and drive down technical debt in the team's tooling & folding remediation work into the regular sprint cadence so it gets resolved rather than deferred.
Partner with Product Management, Operations and other business teams to map how work is done today, eliminate process debt across the workflow, and automate manual and paper-based handoffs end to end — for example, exception handling on submitted business.
Bring feasibility assessments and cross-platform dependencies into quarterly planning, helping translate roadmap priorities into an achievable, well-sequenced plan.
Bring an AI-forward mindset to improve the efficiency and quality of both the annuity products and the software that supports them, and help the team adopt AI-assisted tools and workflows.
Plan and anticipate data and reporting needs ahead of the engineering teams, and partner with the Data Platforms team to plan for upcoming data platform needs.
Lead incident response and post-mortems for complex production issues on annuity policy and transaction systems, and remain available off-hours for critical incidents.
Mentor engineers on the team, review technical designs and architecture decision records, and serve as the team's go-to technical resource.
Engage in hands-on development on an occasional basis — prototyping, spikes, or unblocking the team on a hard problem — while keeping the majority of your time on leadership, architecture, and process.

Benefits

Competitive salary and annual incentive bonuses to reward your contributions.
33 days of paid time off (including PTO, holidays, Volunteer Day, and days of significance).
Paid parental leave after 90 days of service.
Comprehensive medical, dental & vision insurance.
401(k) with company match, plus Profit Sharing & Savings Plan.
Short- and Long-Term Disability Insurance to give you peace of mind.
Flexible Spending Accounts for medical and dependent care.
Life Insurance to protect your loved ones.
Educational assistance to support your career development.
Associate assistance programs for your personal and professional well-being.