Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Established in 2021, Independence Pet Holdings is a corporate holding company that manages a diverse and broad portfolio of modern pet health brands and services, including insurance, pet education, lost recovery services, and more throughout North America.

We believe pet insurance is more than a financial product and build solutions to simplify the pet parenting journey and help improve the well-being of pets. As a leading authority in the pet category, we operate with a full stack of resources, capital, and services to support pet parents. Our multi-brand and omni-channel approach include our own insurance carrier, insurance brands and partner brands.

Staff Software Engineer

Reports To: Software Engineering Manager

Role Summary:

The Staff Software Engineer is a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for driving software design, engineering quality, architecture and technical execution across Embrace's core platforms and engineering teams.

This role works closely with the Software Engineering Manager and engineering teams across Policy Administration, Claims, customer-facing web applications, mobile applications, integrations and shared technology platforms. The Staff Engineer operates across team and product boundaries, helping ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, secure, resilient and aligned with broader technology standards.

This is a highly hands-on engineering role. The Staff Engineer is expected to actively design and build software, review code and technical designs, solve complex production and architectural problems, mentor engineers and help establish reusable engineering patterns across the organization.

The role does not have primary people-management responsibility. Leadership is exercised through technical expertise, mentorship, influence, execution ownership.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams and product verticals

Lead solution design and contribute to architectural decisions for new development, integrations, modernization efforts and platform improvements

Partner with the Software Engineering Manager to establish and evolve technical direction and engineering standards

Evaluate technical tradeoffs and recommend pragmatic solutions that balance scalability, maintainability, security, reliability and delivery speed

Ensure new solutions are designed for reuse and scale rather than creating unnecessary partner-, product-, or team-specific implementations

Identify opportunities to simplify architecture, eliminate duplication and create common services, frameworks, APIs and engineering patterns

Hands-On Software Engineering

Remain actively involved in software development and contribute code to complex, high-impact, or cross-platform initiatives

Develop and support solutions using the Microsoft technology stack, including .NET/C#, Azure, APIs, web applications and supporting data platforms

Provide hands-on technical support across customer-facing applications, policy and claims platforms, integrations and mobile applications

Develop prototypes and reference implementations to validate architectural approaches and establish patterns for other engineers

Troubleshoot complex application, integration, performance and production issues

Code Quality & Engineering Standards

Perform code reviews and design reviews with an emphasis on maintainability, scalability, testability, performance and security

Establish and promote engineering practices for:Software design and coding standardsAPI and integration patternsAutomated testingObservability and application monitoringError handling and resiliencySecure developmentCloud-native application designSource control and branching practices

Help ensure engineering standards are consistently applied across internal and partner development teams

Identify technical debt and work with engineering leadership and Product to prioritize remediation

Cloud, DevOps & Reliability

Help design and improve solutions running within Microsoft Azure

Partner with DevOps and engineering teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, release quality and environment consistency

Promote reliable deployment strategies and engineering practices that reduce production risk

Support observability through effective logging, metrics, tracing, alerting and application performance monitoring

Participate in technical investigation and resolution of critical production incidents

Identify systemic causes of incidents and drive engineering improvements that prevent recurrence

Cross-Team Technical Leadership

Work across engineering verticals rather than being limited to a single application or Scrum team

Serve as a technical escalation point for complex engineering problems

Help teams resolve architectural or implementation blockers while enabling engineers to own their solutions

Facilitate technical collaboration across Engineering, Product, QA, DevOps, Architecture, Security and Operations

Help ensure technical decisions made within individual teams remain aligned with enterprise technology direction

Support technical discovery and provide engineering input during planning and solution development

Mentoring & Engineering Capability

Mentor software engineers and senior engineers through code reviews, design discussions, pairing and technical coaching

Help engineers improve system design, coding, troubleshooting, cloud and software-development skills

Promote knowledge sharing and reduce dependency on individual subject-matter experts

Support cross-training across applications and engineering verticals

Lead by example through strong technical judgment, accountability, collaboration and engineering discipline

Modernization & Technical Debt

Identify areas of legacy architecture and software that create reliability, scalability, performance, or delivery constraints

Help define modernization and refactoring strategies that can be executed incrementally while maintaining platform stability

Drive improvements to existing APIs, integrations, applications and shared services

Advocate for sustainable engineering solutions while balancing immediate business delivery needs

Agile Delivery & Business Partnership

Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, technical discovery and delivery activities using Azure DevOps

Partner with Product Owners and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technically sound solutions

Provide technical estimates, identify dependencies and communicate implementation risks and tradeoffs

Help ensure work entering development is technically understood and appropriately designed

Support the Software Engineering Manager in maintaining strong engineering execution across teams

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional experience

Significant professional software engineering experience with demonstrated progression into senior technical leadership responsibilities

Strong hands-on experience with .NET / C# application development

Strong experience developing cloud-based solutions using Microsoft Azure

Experience designing and developing APIs, integrations, distributed applications and enterprise software systems

Strong understanding of software architecture, object-oriented design, design patterns and modern engineering practices

Experience with Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and modern deployment practices

Strong experience with SQL Server, relational data modeling and application performance

Experience troubleshooting complex production applications and distributed systems

Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without relying on direct reporting authority

Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences

Preferred Experience

Experience with policy administration, claims, insurance, financial services, or other regulated enterprise platforms

Experience modernizing legacy .NET applications and architectures

Experience with Microsoft Dynamics and enterprise integrations

Experience with modern front-end frameworks and web application architecture

Experience supporting or developing native iOS and/or Android applications

Experience designing reusable APIs and integration platforms for multiple consumers or business partners

Experience with application performance monitoring, observability, reliability engineering and production support

Experience working with distributed or offshore engineering teams

Success in This Role

A successful Staff Software Engineer will:

Raise the technical capability of engineers around them

Improve consistency in architecture and engineering practices across teams

Reduce unnecessary duplication and one-off technical solutions

Increase platform scalability, reliability, maintainability and delivery quality

Help engineering teams solve complex problems without becoming a bottleneck

Remain meaningfully hands-on while influencing technology beyond a single application or team

Become a trusted technical partner to the Software Engineering Manager and broader Technology organization

Compensation:

New York Base pay range: $149,880 – $187,349 per year. This is the range we reasonably expect to pay at hire. Placement within the range depends on job-related factors such as experience, skills, and certifications. This position is eligible for an annual bonus. Base pay is one part of a total rewards package that includes the benefits listed below.

All of our jobs come with great benefits including healthcare, parental leave and opportunities for career advancements. Some offerings are dependent upon the location of where you work and can include the following:

Comprehensive full medical, dental and vision Insurance

Basic Life Insurance at no cost to the employee

Company paid short-term and long-term disability

12 weeks of 100% paid Parental Leave

Health Savings Account (HSA)

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)

Retirement savings plan

Personal Paid Time Off

Paid holidays and company-wide Wellness Day off

Paid time off to volunteer at nonprofit organizations

Pet friendly office environment

Commuter Benefits

Group Pet Insurance

On the job training and skills development

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Interview Technology Notice:

Please note that phone and video interviews or screenings may be recorded and transcribed using interview technology to support our recruitment process.

By continuing with the interview, you consent to this use.

Text Messaging Notice:

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You may opt out of text communications at any time by replying “STOP.”

Posting text as published by Independencepetgroup.

The evidence behind this listing

Workplace

Remote Employer field

Seniority

staff+ From the job title

Employment type

Not established

Location as listed

New York, United States of America

Pay and work authorization

Stated pay

$149.9k–187.3k/yr AI reading of the posting

Visa sponsorship

Not stated

Security clearance

Not established

Citizenship

Not established