Staff Software Engineer

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)

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