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 pro

Work arrangement
Yes