Senior Application Architect

United Educators (UE) is a member-owned liability insurer serving K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the United States, with a focus on long-term partnerships. Guided by our mission to support education, we provide exceptional claims support, customized coverage and relevant risk management resources. At UE, you will join a collaborative, mission-driven team committed to delivering flexible insurance solutions, exceptional service and measurable value to our members.

The Senior Application Architect is responsible for developing and evolving UE’s application-layer architecture following the Agile Software Development Life Cycle. This role shapes the technical direction of UE’s business applications by defining application design, domain models, REST API strategy, integration patterns, and code-level standards to ensure systems are scalable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with business strategy.

This position is not an infrastructure or cloud platform architect role. While the Senior Application Architect partners closely with cloud, operations, data, and cybersecurity teams, the primary accountability is for application architecture and application design decisions, including ownership of RESTful services and application integration strategy from concept through implementation and long-term evolution.

The Senior Application Architect works closely with engineering teams, product owners, operations, and security to design and guide the implementation of modern, reliable, and well-integrated application solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Own the end-to-end application architecture for key business systems, including domain modeling, application decomposition, service boundaries, and integration patterns.
• Define and own UE’s API strategy, including RESTful API design standards, documentation, versioning, lifecycle management, and governance.
• Design and govern REST APIs and service contracts that enable reuse, scalability, and consistent integration across internal applications and external partners.
• Strong hands-on experience in .NET, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, REST APIs, domain modeling, and database schema design for enterprise applications.
• Collaborate with business and technical stakeholders to translate strategic objectives and functional needs into application architecture, REST API designs, and implementation approaches.
• Develop and maintain technical and business feature roadmaps in consultation with stakeholders; identify risks, track progress, and communicate status updates to project sponsors.
• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and resilient enterprise application architectures, with a focus on maintainability, extensibility, and performance.
• Define and enforce application architecture standards, design patterns, and coding guidelines to ensure consistency and interoperability across development teams.
• Design and document software architectures using diagrams and models that guide development and support long-term system sustainability.
• Review application and API implementations to ensure adherence to architectural intent, clean code principles, and design patterns.
• Lead application modernization and refactoring efforts, including decomposition of legacy systems into modular or service-aligned architectures.
• Evaluate emerging technologies—including AI, ML, and application integration frameworks—through proofs of concept and pilot implementations, focusing on application-level feasibility and business value.
• Architect, prototype, and build hands-on components of AI-enabled application capabilities, such as generative AI.
• Partner with data engineering teams to design application-aligned data access patterns, pipelines, and governance supporting analytics and machine learning initiatives.
• Engage directly in complex solution development when needed, contributing application code, prototypes, and architectural exemplars.
• Integrate security, privacy, and compliance requirements into application and API design in alignment with UE governance standards.
• Engineer applications and APIs for reliability, scalability, and performance by proactively identifying and resolving…