Lead Software Engineer - Tech Incubation Team

Why Wellmark
:
We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we’ve built our reputation on over 80 years’ worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors–our members. If you’re passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today!

Why Wellmark Technology? Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work.

Leads system design and hands-on development for Wellmark’s Technology Incubation initiatives—turning ambiguous ideas into working prototypes and MVPs rates as a builder and technical catalyst, rapidly experimenting, iterating, and shipping proof-of-value solutions that explore new capabilities (including agentic and AI‑enabled development) and unlock future business outcomes. Partners closely with product, design, architecture, security, and business stakeholders to shape concepts, validate assumptions, and translate opportunities into scalable paths forward.

Serves as a subject matter expert and mentor to other engineers, establishing lightweight patterns and guardrails that maintain quality and security while enabling “build fast, learn faster” delivery.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience in innovation, incubation, or rapid prototyping environments, delivering prototypes/MVPs quickly and iterating based on feedback.
• Proven ability to take ambiguous problems from concept to working solution—shaping hypotheses, building proof-of-value demos, and communicating learnings to stakeholders.
• Strong hands‑on development experience with Node.js/Type Script building APIs, services, and lightweight front‑end or full‑stack prototypes.
• Experience designing and deploying workloads in AWS and/or Azure, including core services for compute, storage, networking, identity, and serverless patterns.
• Experience building with AI/LLM tools and services, such as prompt engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), orchestration/agent frameworks, and integrating AI capabilities into products.
• Familiarity with ML Ops / LLM Ops concepts (evaluation, monitoring, safety guardrails, versioning, and cost/performance tradeoffs).
• Experience delivering production‑minded prototypes using modern practices (CI/CD, IaC, observability basics, automated testing, security‑first patterns).
• Comfort presenting demos, facilitating workshops, and influencing cross‑functional partners (product, architecture, security, business) through clear storytelling and working software.

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, MIS, or related field of study and at least 5 years of development experience (ex. Angular, NodeJS, Python, C++, .NET, Java, SQL) OR 9 years of related and applicable experience.
• Strong analytical problem‑solving skills. Accuracy and high attention to detail. Previous experience troubleshooting and developing creative technical solutions. Ability to provide innovative solutions to complex issues.
• Demonstrated experience in software development lifecycle methodologies.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate with and coach/mentor team members, while setting an example in maintaining a positive attitude, staying calm under pressure, being approachable, respectful and taking responsibility for failures.
• Big picture thinker with the ability to translate the value of the Wellmark as a Service (WaaS) strategy to company strategy when making design and development decisions.
• Demonstrated, strong ability to gather information, perform necessary research needed for root cause analysis, problem definition and formulation, recommend solution implementation, verification, and ongoing optimization, using data to…