Lead Application Development Engineer – Technology

Lead Application Development Engineer

Join American Family Insurance's Payment Technology team and help modernize the secure, scalable applications that power payment experiences across the enterprise. Reporting to the Senior Manager, you will combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership to move legacy solutions to cloud-native architectures and improve customer and business outcomes. You will partner with product, engineering, architecture, and business teams to design and deliver resilient payment capabilities for American Family Insurance.

In this role, you will guide technical decisions, mentor engineers, and apply cloud and AI-enabled practices to strengthen quality, speed, and reliability.

Position Compensation Range:

$ - $

Pay Rate Type:

Salary

Compensation may vary based on the job level and your geographic work location. Relocation support is offered for eligible candidates.

This role does not have approval for sponsorship now or in the future. This includes H1 transfers, OPT, CPT, F1 Visa and STEM.

• Own the technical direction for secure, scalable payment applications—from early concepts and architecture through implementation and production.
• Shape the future of our payment platform by modernizing legacy solutions with cloud-native, microservices, API, event-driven, and distributed-system patterns.
• Turn complex needs into practical solutions by partnering with product, architecture, engineering, and business teams to define designs and delivery plans.
• Stay close to the code, leading development for complex or high-risk capabilities and solving challenges across integrations and dependencies.
• Set the standard for engineering excellence across design, testing, security, observability, performance, documentation, and production readiness.
• Grow the team's technical capabilities by mentoring engineers, guiding key decisions, and connecting the work to meaningful customer and business outcomes.

• Demonstrated experience providing customer-driven solutions, support or service
• Demonstrated experience analyzing and understanding complex software/systems.
• Demonstrated experience communicating technical information.
• Demonstrated experience developing different solution-delivery and design approaches and solutions to customers.
• Demonstrated experience developing complex software/systems using one or more programming language.
• Demonstrated experience analyzing and estimating project size and work efforts for software solutions.
• Demonstrated experience providing technical guidance and leadership to less experienced staff.
• Extensive knowledge and understanding of software development and design standards and methodologies.
• Extensive knowledge and understanding of infrastructure technologies, operating systems, and the interconnectivity between infrastructure platforms and software tools.
• Extensive knowledge and understanding of systems development life cycle (SDLC).
• Solid knowledge and understanding of application architecture and design alternatives.
• Solid Knowledge and understanding of integration and migration strategies and technologies

We value skills gained through many paths. If you meet most of these qualifications and are excited about payment technology, we encourage you to apply.

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.
• Approximately 10+ years in software engineering, application development, or enterprise solution delivery, including 7+ years with Java, Spring Boot, or comparable backend technologies.
• 5+ years building and deploying cloud-native applications, ideally on AWS, using microservices, REST APIs, event-driven architecture, and distributed systems.
• Experience modernizing legacy or high-volume transactional applications; payment-platform, financial-services, or similarly regulated-industry experience is helpful but not required.
• Experience with relevant AWS services, containers, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, observability, security, and resilient production operations.
• Ability to turn business needs into scalable technical designs and use approved AI-assisted tools or cloud AI services to improve engineering quality and efficiency.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through mentoring, architecture and code reviews, stakeholder influence, and delivery of customer-focused business outcomes.

In this HYBRID role, you will work 10 days per month from one of the following office locations:
Madison, WI 53783;
Boston, MA 02110

Internal candidates are encouraged to apply regardless of location and will be considered based on the needs of the role.