Senior Software Engineer

Location: Van Wert, OH; Dublin, OH

Work Model: Hybrid

Position type: Full time - salary

We’re a team of employees passionate about delivering best-in-class customer service and innovation in the industry. Integrity, relationships, and excellence are at the heart of everything we do.

Our employees fully utilize their talents and bring their best selves to work. We believe who you are is just as important as what you do!

Delivering exceptional customer service requires more than great insurance products. It requires digital experiences that meet policyholders where they are. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to serve as the technical member of Central's Digital Product team, adding a new dimension to how Central serves policyholders digitally. This is a rare chance to build something new inside an established, trusted carrier, combining the energy of a startup with the stability of an enterprise. Working closely with a dedicated product manager and designer, you'll have meaningful technical ownership over both the product and the foundation it's built on.

Key Responsibilities Of The Role

• Writes code, arch documents, and contributes to policy standards and owns their individual contributions to software applications development efforts; meets team deliverables by writing code, reviewing and coaching younger engineers, and collaborating with engineering & product managers.
• Does understand when to apply different design patterns and techniques to make sure that code is readable, testable, and able to be changed without incurring significant tech‑debt.
• Understands their team's testing approach, and uses quality metrics to identify gaps. Works with their team to recommend solutions that are in accordance with accepted testing frameworks and the testing pyramid especially if they are not in‑use within the organization today.
• Proficient at using systematic debugging to diagnose all issues within the scope of their domain.
• Drives monitoring work on their team based on the organization's monitoring philosophy. Is aware of the operational data for their team’s domain and uses it as a basis for driving changes to the team's services to achieve stability and performance improvements.
• Has expertise in their team's domain, including the breadth of services, how they interact, and data flows between systems. Understands goals and needs of adjacent domains as they affect their team.
• Participates in inter‑team workflow design conversations. Can help articulate needs of APIs and data‑flows between teams and systems across domain boundaries.
• Can operate in an architect capacity for some work‑streams to design services and systems using well accepted design patterns that allow for iterative, autonomous development and future scaling. Anticipates future use cases and makes design decisions that balance the cost of future changes vs speed to deliver now.
• Actively works with the security team, as well as their own team, to refine their team's approach to security based on the organization's security strategy. Fosters a security first mindset within their own team, and leads by example.
• Reviews epics and projects critically and ensures they’re appropriately broken down and prioritized, and well understood by the team.
• Ensures dependencies are noted and well understood by the team, at both the task and epic level. Works within their team to foster a culture of priority setting and urgency in alignment with organizational and product goals.
• Effectively handles risk, change, and uncertainty within their team. Decides and acts responsibly in their work with their team without having the total picture during routine business, as well as when in high pressure situations.
• Anticipates and communicates blockers, delays, and cost ballooning within their team’s projects, before they require escalation. Ensures expectations with their team and external stakeholders are clarified between all parties involved.
• When taking action, weighs cost and value in order to take the most economic action. Uses this thinking in their own work, and to foster a culture within their team where people apply economic thinking to make timely decisions.
• Fosters a culture of delivering praise and constructive feedback within their team and team's respective business stakeholders. Actively demonstrates these behaviors.
• Fosters a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing within their team and with their team's business stakeholders; actively demonstrates these behaviors.
• Fosters a culture within their team where people are encouraged to share their opinions and contribute to discussions in a respectful manner, approach disagreement non‑defensively with inquisitiveness, and use contradictory opinions as a basis for constructive, productive conversations. Is open to changing their perspective and plans based on others' input.
• Fosters a culture within their team of having conversations based on organizational strategy and principles to create alignment. Strongly oriented towards goals and ensures their team is continuously working towards their goals.
• Thinks about team practices and processes and regularly discusses improvements with their team. Sometimes collaborates with others to improve organizational practices and processes.
• Mentors their teammates in an open, respectful, flexible, empathetic manner. Seeks out mentoring opportunities specifically to create team redundancy and backfill ability. Mentors members of other teams as needed.
• Has a thorough understanding of their team's domain, strategy, and how it maps to overall market trends. Has a thorough understanding of adjacent teams' strategies and how they map to their team and interaction points.
• Evaluates and creates new product features in collaboration with the product team. Regularly participates in the creation of the team roadmap and ensuing feedback. Simplifies product and technical design through proactive conversations.
• Can solely represent the team in design and debugging conversations with other teams.
• Can help coordinate design and implementation conversations across teams.
• Is able to propose architectural decisions via RFCs, and is able to document architecture through modeling diagrams like state diagrams, sequence diagrams, etc.
• Provides feedback to Engineering Managers on how the software delivery process is performing via data collection
• Is able to help enforce standards and agreed upon behaviors through behavior and code‑reviews.
• Writes unit‑tests, integration tests, schema verification tests as appropriate. Provides feedback to junior engineers on how to organize code to be more testable.
• Can communicate trade‑offs team members when choosing between different approaches to designs.
• Communicates daily with engineers on the team to keep others aware of progress. Will pair‑program as appropriate based on the team expectations.
• Actively provides feedback to other engineers through mechanisms like pair‑programming, peer‑review, RFC‑based development, stand‑ups or other means.
• Knows the tools, techniques and processes that are used within the team to deliver within their context and can help onboard newer engineers and provide information on how they are to be used.

Required Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science and 2 years of related experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 4 years related experience
• 6 years related experience

Preferred Qualifications

• You are either a front‑end specialist or well‑versed in effective service oriented architecture patterns.
• You can help engineers make design choices that balance speed to change now vs flexibility to change later.
• You treat engineering as a craft and enjoy coaching others

Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities

• Advanced technical knowledge of complex software systems, including enterprise, middleware, and messaging systems
• Strong experience in software development, systems engineering
• Expert business acumen and knowledge of root cause analysis and problem detection
• Extensive experience with multiple software applications design tools and languages
• Excellent analytical and problem‑solving skills
• Evaluating forms and processes for software applications testing and methodology, including writing and execution of test plans, debugging, and testing scripts and tools
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to effectively communicate product architectures, design proposals and negotiate options at senior management levels

Total Rewards

Central establishes base pay based on several factors including labor market data and an evaluation of candidate qualifications relative to role requirements. Base pay is one component of a comprehensive total rewards package designed to support employees’ financial, health, career, and retirement objectives. Central provides extensive health and wellness benefits to promote flexibility, work‑life balance, and long‑term financial security. For more information, see Central Insurance Benefits

Work Authorization

Central will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States. This is not a position for which sponsorship will be provided. Individuals with temporary visas such as E, F‑1(including those with OPT or CPT), H‑1, H‑2, L‑1, B, J or TN, or who need sponsorship for work authorization now or in the future, are not eligible for hire.

Equal Opportunity Employer

It is the policy of Central that all recruiting, hiring, training, compensation, overtime, job classification and assignment, facilities, promotions, transfers, employee treatment and all other terms and conditions of employment shall be maintained in a manner which will not discriminate against any person because of race, color, age, sex, national origin, ancestry, religion, marital status, military status, or disability. The applicant should respond to questions on this application in a way that will not divulge such information. AS1