Western and Southern Financial Group is a Fortune 500 company and worldwide life insurance industry leader with over $50 billion of life insurance inforce. Gerber Life is a subsidiary offering protection for the entire family with over 3.8 million active insurance policies. Gerber Life primarily distributes insurance products through direct marketing and agency methods. A custom modernized sales software platform created by the IT Solutions Delivery (ITSD) Team runs all new business and underwriting operations. ITSD performs all custom application development on the new platform; specification & design through release management and production application support.

The Sr Web Engineer plays a key role for the enterprise as a member of ITSD by performing all full-stack development for Gerber Life’s sales platform responsible for processing 730K new life insurance applications per year for DTC and independent agent distribution. This role continuously performs hands-on software development in order to meet business objectives in an accurate, cost efficient and timely manner.

The ideal candidate is a life insurance full-stack web engineer by trade with experience delivering digital life insurance solutions that drives sales. A deep track record of success working with life insurance full-stack web engineering teams developing and supporting new business and underwriting applications is mandatory. Extensive infrastructure, application, integration, data and security technology expertise along with a passion for innovation and application development leadership through a hands-on approach is essential.

• Application Development & Support (75%)

• Responsible for continuous improvement and support of the custom sales platform which processes 100% of Gerber Life’s direct to consumer (DTC) and alternate distribution new business and underwriting transactions (~750K life insurance applications per year).
• Employs technology to optimize the sales process for all active Gerber Life products while ensuring uninterrupted new business and underwriting processing across the entire custom platform software suite including: a digital independent agent portal (50K users), internal agent contact center sales portal (500 users), an operations portal for entry of paper life insurance applications, an underwriting workbench supporting both distribution channels and one set of DTC web desktop applications and another set of DTC mobile applications.
• Performs full-stack development collaborating with business architects to deliver continuous improvement of digital marketing offers, web analytics, life insurance web applications, underwriting straight-through processing, web sales funnel content personalization and multi-variate test orchestration of those web sales funnel variations in production.
• Owns the encapsulation of the features of all insurance products configured for use by sales applications.
• Personally delivers complex life insurance related software by individually performing hands-on coding, debugging and testing using all technologies in place across the entire custom sales platform.
• Accountable for adhering to all architecture blueprints, ITSD internal software development policies, procedures as well as enterprise standards for data security and regulatory compliance.
• Calculates delivery estimates, manages individual priorities to meet those delivery estimates and partners with all other web engineer team members to do the same.
• Provides contractor acceptance criteria and instruction for ensuring an orderly transition of 100% of all work delivered by contractors to FTEs.
• Contributes to migration pathway to cloud for the entire sales platform.

• Software Delivery Leadership (25%)

• Relentlessly fosters ITSD collaboration and exchange of ideas achieving swift ITSD and cross-team decision-making for evolving the platform in the best interest of the business.
• Continuously evaluates team dynamics and intervenes to improve the effectiveness, quality and rate at which Gerber Life can introduce software change for business impact.
• Educates other groups on ITSD delivery process to set expectations and understanding for efficient management of resources
• Creates and sustains impeccable working relationships with all ITSD team members and provides both technical and professional guidance to all direct reports, subordinates and ITSD peers.
• Works closely with business architecture, marketing and sales leadership providing options for employing technology for incremental revenue and competitive advantage.
• Openly accepts direction and constantly seeks direction from the business architecture team for all platform improvement requests received from business partners as well as the accompanying solutions devised and proposed by ITSD engineers.

• Leads by example by working directly with delivery and acceptance teams to deliver desired outcomes.
• Must be viewed as a leader in the enterprise by the IT organization, customers and management.
• Evaluates new prevailing technologies fitness for use and practices experimentation as a core means of determining technology direction.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience

• 7+ years of large-scale public facing e-commerce web development (front-end UI) experience
• 7+ years of UI and API level test automation experience
• 7+ years of java BPM & SOA software development (back-end)
• 7+ years delivering software using agile delivery methods
• 5+ years of cyber security engineering
• 5+ years of identity management
• 5+ years application development experience in a cloud environment

• 10+ years direct marketing and life insurance industry experience

• 7+ years direct marketing experience
• 7+ years life insurance experience

• Enterprise systems thinking - specifically the ability to see how individual systems and applications and parts interact with the enterprise (big picture thinking).
• Comprehensive knowledge of infrastructure, applications, integration, design patterns, database, agile delivery methods, build and deployment processes, software development and systems engineering.
• Ability to develop a wide range of architecture documents (application and infrastructure design documents).
• Exceptional executive-level communication skills (written / oral) and ability to communicate complex technical information to all stakeholders, including those who do not have a technical background.
• Must be a team player able to work effectively at all levels of an organization.
• Must be an effective technology leader able to build & maintain solid working relationships across the organization.
• Must have an agile mindset and passion for innovation, agile delivery methods and continuous integration.

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Creative, open-minded and ability to work under indirect supervision.

• This is a remote position which requires extensive use of audio and video conferencing sessions to effectively participate and collaborate with all members of the organization.
• A disruption-free home office environment is mandatory.
• Quarterly on-site travel to work in offices located in White Plains, NY (Gerber Life HQ), Fremont MI (Gerber Life Operations) and Cincinnati, OH (Western and Southern Financial Group HQ) requires formal and casual business attire.

• M.S. Computer Science

• Websphere Application Server, Jetty Web Server
• SQL, No-SQL, Cloud DB Migration Service and Cache technologies (DynaCache, Redis)
• Cypress, Jasmine, Selenium, Cucumber, J-Meter, J-Unit
• Java, Spring, BPM, SOA and Rule Engines
• Angular, NgRx, CSS, HTML, jQuery, AJAX
• Oracle Maxymiser, CMS (Drupal and Sitecore)
• Identity Management and Single-Sign-On technologies (Shibboleth, OKTA, Ping)
• GIT, Maven, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, JIRA, Elastic Search, Kibana, Logstash
• Cloud Platforms (Azure, Google Cloud and AWS

• Certified Java Developer
• Certified Web Developer (Angular, CSS, HTML)
• Certified Test Automation Engineer (Cucumber & Selenium)
• Certified Cloud Solutions Architect

• Remote working effectiveness for reliable and meaningful virtual collaboration throughout the entire day.
• Remote position demands constant personal status and calendar management using a variety of collaboration technologies (Skype, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, WebEx, Outlook, Softphone).
• Long hours spent in front of a PC collaborating, working on projects and support.
• Monthly weekday evening deployment support participation is required.
• Must be available 24 x 7 for Level II application production support emergencies