Principal Application Engineer - Legal & General America

At Legal & General America, we aim to make a positive difference in the lives of our customers, partners, colleagues, and the communities in which they live.  As a recognized market leader of term life insurance, we’re working to transform our business through innovation and technology to provide products and solutions that help American families secure their financial futures.

We are a future-focused company, passionate about what we do and how we do it. This means working with pace and energy to reach our goals, and challenging ourselves to achieve more.  We strive to create a unique environment where balance between work and life is possible. Our employees' passion, dedication and hard work, as well as our career development opportunities, benefits, and employee activities contribute to our positive workplace culture.

Legal and General America is looking for a Principal Application Engineer to help design and build one of the leading digital life insurance platforms in the financial services industry. 

The Principal Application Engineer will drive development practices focused on creativity and innovation across our project portfolios.  The Principal Application Engineer plays a critical role in driving the technical details for projects, spanning multiple areas and product teams.  They need to understand the design, code, and features required by many different business areas and deliver quality solutions to meet those needs.  They must be able to design and implement services that are scalable, efficient, available, and low cost to maintain. They will influence other application engineers to come up with the best design and implement common patterns to standardize our code base. They have good partnership and influence skills and can work across multiple teams of varying technical knowledge. They must have knowledge of at least two technology stacks (software systems, programming languages, frameworks, Databases, Tools, and APIs). They must have a proven history of technical leadership delivering at least two medium-to-large scale initiatives or projects. Must be able to present complex technical concepts to a wide variety of audiences. 

The Principal Application Engineer is the highest level in our Application Engineer series and may be assigned to function in a supervisor capacity as well.  The management aspect of the role is not required in order to attain the Principal level, and this will be considered on a case by case basis relative to the individual’s skillset, career interest, and overall resource planning.  If a Principal is assigned management responsibilities this would not exceed 2 direct reports.  Management responsibility would reduce the technical workload, but not eliminate the expectation that the individual performs all technical tasks as defined in the role.

Essential Responsibilities

• Drive multiple projects through to delivery removing obstacles as needed to ensure success.
• Gain a working understanding of Legal and General America as a business and collaborate with leaders to contribute to cohesive, end-to-end experiences for customers.
• Provide Technical and Thought Leadership during ideation, design and development of web-based applications and micro-services using both front-end and back-end technologies (full stack development), including but not limited to technical design, coding, unit, and performance testing to generate high quality deliverables to achieve product release objectives.
• Drive improvements to application engineering practices.
• Identify changes needed to improve customer/partner experience through a data driven approach.
• Maintain knowledge and understanding of corporate security procedures and policies for implementation, auditing, and documentation purposes as part of the application implementation process.
• Mentor and train application engineering team members, including both employees and contractors, fostering personal and professional growth.
• Provide technical leadership and expertise during code/peer reviews to ensure that LGA coding standards and industry best practices are followed.
• Keep up to date with industry trends and apply to projects as appropriate.
• Recommend business solutions by comparing advantages and disadvantages of building solutions ourselves vs low code / no code options available in the market.
• Prepare technical documentation and participate in and perform/lead code reviews to ensure that application code meets internal standards and follows industry best practices.
• Research new technologies and present proposals to management on technologies that would facilitate processing of business or reduce costs to the organization to architects and management.

Management Responsibilities (only applicable if assigned management duties) 

• Set performance goals, facilitate achievement of goals, and provide performance feedback for a team size of no more than 2 direct reports.
• Foster a team environment that is open, informed and empowered, in order to continually improve effectiveness and deliver value to the business.
• Ensure outcomes are delivered on-time, on-budget, and on-quality as committed to business SME’s, ensuring the right control and governance are in place for planning, tracking, and reporting.

Education

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science or Engineering OR equivalent years of work experience.

Experience/Knowledge

• 10+ years of industry experience developing production quality software in Agile Environment using C# and Javascript.
• 3+ years designing distributed systems.
• Expert-Level knowledge of .NET and .NET Core Frameworks
• Azure Service Bus, ESB and EDA (Event Driven Architecture) pattern.
• Full stack Web software development experience, implementing cross-browser web Applications, backend, and integration Services.
• Working knowledge of Microservices Architecture Design.
• Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps culture, practices, and tools.
• Proven background leading design, implementation, and supporting features of .NET cloud-based solutions as a principal developer.
• Strong analytical skills Ability to quickly ramp-up on complex and unfamiliar code.
• Excellent written and verbal communication/presentation skills through all levels of the organization, technical and non‐
• Understanding values, principles, and practices of Agile project management frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban.
• General knowledge of life insurance principles is a plus.

Interpersonal Skills

• Desire to learn, a tendency to embrace challenges, see failures as essential to mastery, learn from criticism and find lessons and inspiration in the success of others.
• Help to create a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self, where all voices are heard, and where we do our best work as a result.
• Confident and articulate in expressing ideas to a mixed audience with varying views and challenges.
• A sense of personal ownership and accountability is required, together with the ability to develop and deliver to deadlines while managing internal stakeholder expectations.
• Self-motivated with a strong drive for reaching across teams and organizations to make progress collaboratively.
• An approachable mentor who is viewed as an expert and acts like one. Constructively challenge assumptions, guide, and encourage collaboration.

Technical Skills

• Expert-level knowledge of C#, .NET Core, .NET Frameworks
• Web Services, Micro-services, SQL, Entity Framework
• HTML, HTML5, CSS, Responsive Design
• Experience with Typescript and JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Angular, etc.)
• Experience with unit testing frameworks (nUnit, MSTest, Jasmine, Karma, etc.)
• Experience with Jira and Confluence
• Experience with version control systems and tools such as Git and Bitbucket
• Experience with developing containerized applications with Docker, Kubernetes (or other container technologies)
• Experience developing Cloud Applications and Cloud-Native Applications (Azure, AWS, GCP, etc.)
• Practical experience with Delphi 7, Delphi 11, or COBOL, though not required, would be a significant value add.
• Experience with EDA (Event Driven Architecture).

 Preferred Certifications

• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900
• Microsoft Azure Developer Associate AZ-204
• Azure Solution Architect Expert AZ 305

What’s in it for you?

The expected hiring compensation range for this position is $132,800 - $182,600 annually.

This role will be working in a hybrid environment with up to 3 days in office per week.

The total compensation package for this position may include other elements, such as a sign-on bonus, long term incentives, and annual bonuses.  This role is eligible to participate in the Legal & General America Annual Incentive Plan. The current target payment for the position is 20% of base salary, modified for corporate and individual performance. Bonuses are pro-rated based on start date.  This role has 20 vacation days and 10 sick days that are accrued on a bi-weekly basis. Employees also have 9 paid holidays throughout the calendar year.

We have a competitive compensation and benefits package focused on your overall wellbeing.  Employee benefits include health, life, and dental insurance; 401K with company match up to 6% as well as a pension package; generous time off; and wellbeing initiatives throughout the year (we like doing fun stuff).  We’re big on professional development and we’ll support and mentor you in your career progression and expect you to help us pay it forward by helping us develop tomorrow's leaders and growth-focused professionals. We value our teams and our communities and believe in giving back. Enjoy time off to volunteer for those causes that matter most to you!

If hired, employee will be in an “at-will position” and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors. The Company reserves the right to change benefits plans at any time.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.