Lead Software Engineer; Federated GraphQL

Being good neighbors – helping people, investing in our communities, and making the world a better place – is who we are at State Farm. It is at the core of how we operate and the reason for our success. Come join a #1 team and do some good!

HYBRID: A “Hybrid” position means selected candidates will be assigned to a facility and will spend some time working both in the office and from home. For Enterprise Technology, a hybrid work arrangement will require approximately 40% in-office time each month, beginning in late 2027.
HUB LOCATIONS: Richardson, TX

SPONSORSHIP:
Applicants for this position are required to be eligible to lawfully work in the U.S. immediately; employer will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work authorization (e.g. H-1B visa) for this opportunity.

The Policy Graph team is building the GraphQL layer that unifies policy data across State Farm's lines of business and policy systems, making it accessible to applications, digital experiences, and AI. We're building this from the ground up, defining the schemas, engineering patterns, and architecture that will support enterprise-wide access to policy data.

The technical challenges are significant. Policy data varies by state, line of business, and underlying system, spanning legacy platforms and multiple generations of modernization efforts. Our job is to bring that complexity into a consistent, modernized data model exposed through a performant and scalable graph. We're currently prototyping in Type Script, but the production stack is still open. Type Script, Go, Java, or a combination will be evaluated based on performance, scalability, and engineering tradeoffs.

We're looking for engineers who have built and run federated GraphQL in production and want to help shape it at enterprise scale.

What you'll do

• Bring federated GraphQL expertise to the team: entity design, schema composition and evolution, and patterns other domains can follow.
• Design the Policy GraphQL schema with architects and data model stewards.
• Work closely with partner teams: architecture, consuming domains, policy administration system teams and the GraphQL platform team.
• Build federated subgraphs that read close to the source: straight from databases, policy administration system APIs, or a read model we own.
• Own performance against p99 targets: load test, profile and tune.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience.
• Production experience with federated GraphQL: designing entities and keys, composing and evolving schemas across teams, for example with Apollo Federation or similar.
• Passion for the work and a collaborative approach: you pair, give thoughtful code reviews, and welcome healthy debate with teammates and partner teams.
• Backend development in one or more of Go, Java or Node.js/Type Script.
• Picks up new languages and technologies quickly.
• Uses AI coding assistants effectively in day-to-day work.
• Integrated services that call other systems, handling slow or failing dependencies, for example with timeouts, retries and batching.
• Builds for the long term: automated unit, integration and end-to-end tests that catch regressions and keep the code safe to change.

• Led federated GraphQL adoption or schema governance across multiple teams.
• Go GraphQL (gqlgen) or Java GraphQL (Spring for GraphQL, Netflix DGS).
• Temporal, or another durable workflow engine, for long-running processes.
• Diagnosed and fixed a latency or throughput problem using an APM tool such as Dynatrace or Open Telemetry.
• Built APIs on Kubernetes or Open Shift, and AWS.
• Worked with canonical or industry data models, such as ACORD.
• Insurance experience is a plus, not a requirement.
• gRPC, event-driven systems or caching.