Software Engineer III

About the Job

Northwestern Mutual (NM) has been helping families and businesses achieve financial security for over 165+ years. Through a distinctive, whole‑picture planning approach including both insurance and investments, we empower people to be financially confident. We combine the expertise of our financial professionals with a personalized digital experience and leading‑edge technology to best serve our clients. To help guide the collaborative effort, we are in search of a Software Engineer III to join our team.

Northwestern Mutual's Institutional Investments organization manages complex, long‑term portfolios supporting the company's insurance and financial obligations. We are seeking an engineer with exceptional SQL expertise to help drive high‑quality, data‑driven investment decisions.

In this role, you will design and deliver high‑quality analytics solutions that support portfolio management, asset allocation, risk analysis, and strategic initiatives. You will work closely with investment professionals, risk teams, actuarial partners, and technology stakeholders, leveraging a modern analytics stack including Snowflake, dbt, Python, Streamlit, and AI‑driven methods.

• Act as a SQL subject‑matter expert, writing and optimizing complex queries for large‑scale analytical workloads
• Design and maintain analytical data models in Snowflake using dbt
• Build investments insights data product
• Develop advanced SQL transformations using window functions, CTEs, and performance‑aware patterns
• Create Streamlit‑based analytics applications
• Apply AI/ML techniques to enhance investment insights
• Ensure data quality, governance, and documentation
• Assess and provide solutions to system‑wide architectural problems
• Utilize working relationships across teams within their division
• Write clean, efficient, and maintainable code, adhering to coding standards and guidelines
• Practice Agile methodologies, analyze project requirements, and establish relationships with data owners and experts
• Contribute to technical discussions and decision‑making processes within the team
• Translate raw data into usable business information to achieve business value

• 5+ years of experience in data analytics within finance or insurance
• Expert‑level SQL including complex joins, window functions, and query optimization
• Strong experience with Snowflake, dbt, and Python
• Deep understanding of data warehousing
• Excellent communication skills

• Institutional investment experience
• Familiarity with market data, risk and performance systems
• Experience with CI/CD and analytics engineering practices
• Experience in AWS services and integrating Snowflake with cloud‑native services
• Familiarity with data governance tools like Collibra, Axon, Alation
• Familiarity with Business Intelligence tools like Power BI and Tableau

Analytical Thinking:
Organizes and compares various aspects of a situation to comprehend and identify key or underlying complex issues through the use of quantitative data and analysis; leverages strong business acumen, problem solving, and interpersonal skills to think critically about situations from multiple perspectives and consistently seeks ways to improve processes.

Business Application:
Utilizes both business acumen and technology expertise to translate business requirements/capabilities into technical solutions and applies technical knowledge of a product/platform/application to align it with a particular line of business (LOB) based on the organization's technology needs and business goals.

Data Literacy:
Utilizes appropriate data for a particular purpose by thinking critically about information yielded by data analysis; applies data analytics tools/methods and their appropriate purposes and recognizes when data is being misrepresented to resolve issues or elevate to the appropriate party.

Software Problem Solving:
Conducts in‑depth analysis of technology needs, issues, and roadblocks within assigned scope, applies experience and expertise to apply best practices, explore the “art of possible,” and deliver blueprints for the most effective and…