Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer at Thrivent

The Insurance Application Fulfillment Product Group at Thrivent is seeking a Staff Engineer to help lead the modernization of the Insurance Application Issue process across Life, Health, and Annuity business lines. In this pivotal role, you will partner closely with Product and Underwriting leadership to shape technology strategy, drive architectural decisions, and deliver solutions that are scalable, governed, and resilient within a highly regulated environment.

This position uniquely combines deep technical contribution with systems-level ownership. We are looking for an engineer energized by complex problem spaces, eager to engage deeply with business and technical contexts, and motivated to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions. You will influence solution approaches, integrate with legacy and vendor systems, maximize reuse of existing platforms, and support thoughtful build-versus-buy decisions, all while remaining hands-on and engaged in delivery.

Key Responsibilities:

• Designing Solutions: Apply expert industry knowledge and a broad understanding of multiple disciplines with technical knowledge to drive customer outcomes. Work and problem-solve independently on initiatives aligning with the broader software engineering strategy. Design systems and software integration patterns across a diverse software engineering ecosystem, ensuring alignment with high-level engineering goals and business initiatives.
• Developing Software: Utilize independent, critical thinking to solve complex, customer-significant problems. Inform decision-making with application and system data, alongside past experiences. Act as a leader in technical expertise, developing the most architecturally impactful components of solutions and identifying, incorporating, and defining development frameworks and libraries beneficial to the product.
• Learning and Applying New Techniques: Proactively seek out industry and technology knowledge and best practices to share within the team.
• Collaborating within the Team: Coordinate the design and integration of entire systems, including subsystems. Research and recommend technology improvements. Participate in team collaboration sessions to provide technical expertise and resolve roadblocks. Contribute to product planning, helping product owners create technical user stories and contributing to detailed application specifications, standards, diagrams, and coding best practices.
• Collaborating Across Teams: Broker solution design and implementation across product teams to achieve desired outcomes. Contribute to overall systems design involving multiple teams, researching and providing customization or development recommendations, and implementing them accordingly.
• Collaborating Across The Organization: Act as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to provide insights into overall operations and support processes, building resilient enterprise systems.
• Setting Product/Platform Technology Strategy: Lead the design of critical path/technology for the product group. Contribute innovative solutions aligned with strategic customer objectives. Provide platform technology expertise to internal and interdependent teams. Help define the technology/tools roadmap with the product owner.
• Defining Engineering Standards and Patterns: Partner with the engineering community within and outside Thrivent to establish best practices. Share engineering standards across internal teams and collaborate to help software engineers apply these patterns.
• DevOps: Lead the resolution of critical incidents and proactively address product issues. Continuously assess technology for more stable, scalable, and resilient software. Promote and expand the use of CI/CD pipelines to improve deployment and build processes.
• Selecting & Managing Technology Vendors: Lead the evaluation of software solutions, advising on strengths and weaknesses of external software. Summarize tool impacts on business processes and goals. Contribute to criteria for selecting the right platforms and software.
• Coaching Engineers: Provide guidance and reinforcement for established engineering best practices. Offer technical leadership and mentoring to engineers of varying levels within the product group. Conduct trainings and demos to address knowledge gaps.
• Recruiting and Building Talent: Engage in the tech community to build Thrivent's technology brand. Participate in interviews and act as a Talent Captain. Model Thrivent’s leadership competencies: courage, collaboration, and commitment. Support continuous improvement, strong engagement, and client commitment. Shape a culture aligned with Thrivent’s purpose, promise, and values.

Qualifications:

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of experience in engineering environments, transforming abstract business concepts into scalable, well-architected software solutions.
• Proven experience architecting software solutions meeting performance SLOs, availability, reliability, and security requirements.
• Strong understanding of data and system integration patterns, including incorporating data-driven capabilities into application workflows.
• Proficiency in managing large-scale technical initiatives and navigating complex engineering efforts.
• Ability to clearly articulate complex technical and systems concepts to engineers, product partners, and business stakeholders.
• Strong conceptual, critical thinking, technical, and problem-solving skills, with attention to detail and sound engineering judgment.
• Ability to engage confidently with senior leaders to present architectural perspectives and technical documentation.

Preferred:

• Master’s degree in a related field.
• Financial Services industry experience.
• Experience coaching/mentoring other team members.
• Familiarity with modern technology stacks and cloud platforms.
• Proficiency in Java, with familiarity in data-oriented languages such as Python or R.
• Understanding of model-driven decision systems used in underwriting or decision-support workflows.
• Financial services industry experience, specifically with underwriting systems and workflows across insurance products.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners across Product, Underwriting, Architecture, and Engineering teams.
• Experience with vendor evaluation, platform selection, or working with external technology providers.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and improving technical consistency, quality, and delivery outcomes across teams.

Key skills/competency:

• Software Architecture
• System Integration
• Technical Leadership
• Scalable Solutions
• Java
• DevOps
• Financial Services
• Underwriting Systems
• Mentorship
• Problem Solving