Software Architect - Insurance Platforms

Description

The company provides medical insurance for cats and dogs across North America and builds the platform behind its insurance products.

This is a hands-on architect role that mixes long-term technical strategy with work close to delivery. You will set technical direction with engineering, product, and business teams, and help make sure technology choices serve business goals and customers.

Strong fit here means deep cloud-native architecture skills, solid business judgment, experience reshaping existing platforms, and the ability to shape decisions without formal authority while staying involved in building and shipping.

Responsibilities

• Design architecture for policy administration, billing, claims, payments, customer servicing, underwriting, and partner integrations.
• Define how systems interact, including integration patterns, data flows, and service boundaries.
• Produce and keep up architecture documents such as solution designs, sequence diagrams, data models, and technical roadmaps.
• Check that solutions follow the company's technology standards and architecture principles.
• Design highly available, scalable, and secure distributed systems using current architecture practices.
• Champion domain-driven design, API-first REST development, event-driven design, CI/CD gated by tests, observability, and automated testing.
• Set standards for resilience, performance, maintainability, and day-to-day operations.
• Work with engineering teams so architecture decisions actually get built.
• Set up integration approaches using APIs and event messaging so systems exchange data efficiently, securely, and reliably.
• Work with data platform teams on reporting, analytics, and operational data needs.
• Assess new technologies, frameworks, and vendor products, and run proofs of concept to test architecture ideas.
• Recommend build or buy options based on business value, cost, risk, and long-term upkeep, favoring proven products you can integrate and extend over custom code.
• Track developments in cloud, insurance technology, architecture, and AI-assisted development.
• Use AI to shorten time to market and raise software quality, and promote secure, effective AI use across teams.
• Review existing systems to find simplification and modernization chances and reduce technical debt.
• Plan modernization that limits disruption to the business, including breaking up systems where it makes sense.
• Keep modernization work aligned with long-term business and technology goals.
• Lead technical guidance from concept through production, helping teams work through decisions, trade-offs, and problems.
• Take part in architecture reviews and design discussions.
• Advise engineering and product leadership on technical matters.
• Work with product, engineering, security, data, infrastructure, DevOps, and business stakeholders, and align them on architecture and priorities.
• Explain technical ideas clearly to both technical peers and executives, in business terms when needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• At least 8 years of software engineering experience.
• At least 3 years in solution architecture, software architecture, or principal-level engineering.
• Extensive experience building and delivering distributed cloud applications with C,.NET, Azure, REST APIs, SQL Server, and event-driven architectures.
• Working knowledge of microservices, integration patterns, and modern architecture principles.
• Experience designing secure, scalable, highly available enterprise applications.
• Track record of influencing technical direction across several teams.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Preferred: experience in property and casualty, healthcare, pet insurance, financial services, or other highly regulated industries.
• Preferred: experience with Azure Service Bus, Event Grid, Azure Functions, API Management, and modern integration platforms.
• Preferred: experience with domain-driven design.
• Preferred: experience with CQRS and event sourcing.
• Preferred: experience with SOLID design principles.
• Preferred: experience building and consuming SaaS platforms and third-party integrations.
• Preferred: knowledge of insurance operations such as claims, billing, underwriting, policy administration, or customer service.
• Preferred: experience with AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering productivity practices.

Conditions

This role is open only to candidates in the Seattle, WA area.

Hybrid schedule: you work remotely or in the Seattle office, and you must be in the office at least 3 days a week, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

The office is casual and welcomes pets.

Full-time position with a base salary of $170,000 to $190,000.

Employees are eligible for monthly bonuses in addition to base pay.

New hires receive Restricted Stock Units that vest over 4 years.

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. The company cannot sponsor or take over an employment visa at this time.

The company is an equal-opportunity employer and values diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage at no cost to the employee.
• Four weeks of paid time off plus 9 paid float holidays, chosen by you.
• A five-week sabbatical after five years of employment.
• Free pet health insurance for one dog or cat.
• Paid time off to volunteer at nonprofit organizations.
• Free on-site gym, free dog walking for office pets during business hours, free parking, and paid ORCA transit cards at the Seattle office.