Application Engineering Director

Amerisure creates exceptional value for its partners, policyholders, and employees. As a property and casualty insurance company, Amerisure’s promise to our partner agencies and policyholders begins with a comprehensive line of insurance products designed to protect businesses, as well as the health and safety of every employee. With an A.M. Best “A” (Excellent) rating, Amerisure serves mid-sized commercial enterprises focused in construction, manufacturing and healthcare. Ranked as one of the top 100 Property & Casualty companies in the United States, we proudly manage nearly $1 Billion of Direct Written Premium and maintain $1.21 billion in surplus.

Amerisure is currently recruiting for an Application Engineering Director that will support our Farmington Hills Office with a 3-day onsite hybrid approach. The ideal candidate will also possess the following skill set. 

Summary Statement

Manages and provides strategic direction in the development and maintenance of applications within the Information Technology department's portfolio.  Leads and supports application development process and methodology improvements to drive high quality, timely deliverables.  Leads team in adoption of user-centered design principles, DevOps practices and continuous improvement processes. Influences our technical architecture and related business and technology strategies to enhance our current capabilities, deliver new solutions, and enable rapid experimentation and delivery.

Essential Tasks/Major Duties

• Lead and direct staff in area of responsibility with an emphasis on talent management, development and succession planning in line with the company’s strategic direction.
• Lead a software engineering team focused on delivering web applications, APIs and integrations (PL/SQL and ODI integration platform) while modernizing technical architecture, capabilities, and software development practices and/or platforms.
• Act as Application Development Process Owner for a critical organizational improvement domain such as DevOps, Agile (Scrum or Scaled) or RPA. Establish the processes and tools to be used to foster IT-wide maturity, adoption of software development best practices and provide technical guidance for teams.
• Collaborate across teams to increase adoption of agile methodology and practices that increase organization effectiveness and engineering maturity.
• Work with customers/stakeholders to understand critical business success factors and key performance indicators to be managed, negotiate desired service levels and manage business risks.
• Ensure development strategy and system architecture is aligned with business and IT strategic objectives and technology standards.
• Provide technical expertise and manage relationships with business partners and stakeholders.
• Anticipate and manage technology evolution and relate it to business solutions in support of continuous improvement.
• Actively cultivate an inclusive engineering culture to create high performing teams and individuals with a goal of sustainable, long-term growth and advancement and innovation.
• Accountable for project/product delivery for area of responsibility including staffing, execution approach (design, development, testing and maintenance), customer satisfaction and associated metrics.
• Responsible for budgeting, resource planning, personnel and administrative management functions for assigned development groups.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent years of experience.
• 10 years of application development experience.
• 3 years of leadership experience.
• Experience in the insurance industry preferred.
• Familiarity with modern cloud-native development models and integration architecture.
• Experience leading a centralized team providing support to multiple aligned development teams.
• Experience in Enterprise DevOps solutions with emphasis on Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
• Experience with digital transformation technology including Salesforce and customer portals preferred.
• Working knowledge of web application development, APIs and API gateway strategies preferred.
• Strong interpersonal skills including the ability to effectively build relationships across all levels of the organization.
• Ability to think strategically with supporting analytical skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to deal with ambiguity.
• Ability to lead discussions, make presentations and deliver technical results to a non-technical audience.
• Ability to manage multiple project work teams using applied principles of project management.