Staff Software Engineer

We’re Looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer!

About the Company:
Security Benefit is a leader in the U.S. retirement market with more than $60 billion in assets under management. We offer opportunities to thrive, innovate, and make an impact. As part of our team, you’ll play a key role in driving the future of the U.S. retirement industry. Security Benefit is a PLACE where we promise to help our customers To and Through Retirement®.
We’re proud to have been recognized as one of the best in the business:
• Named to Ward’s 50 list of top-performing life-health insurance companies
• Recognized on list of Ingram’s Top 100 Private Companies in the Kansas City area in 2024

About the Role:
We are building Security Benefit’s first true customer-facing digital experience: a unified self-service platform where our customers and the financial professionals who advise them can transact with us digitally, instantly, and securely. As the Staff Software Engineer for Digital Experience, you will be the technology lead responsible for enabling this platform end to end. That includes authentication, the API gateway, the unified data layer, fraud and identity, and the customer-facing applications built on top. You will be the senior-most individual contributor on the build, the technical anchor for our Digital Experience Center of Excellence, and the partner to our Enterprise Solution Architects on the architecture decisions that will shape the platform for years. You will remain hands-on, writing code, leading the hardest design work, and personally owning the most critical and complex systems. This is a Staff role with the influence of one and the build velocity of an early-stage team. There is a clear, public timeline. The work is visible at the highest levels of the company.

This role is fully remote. The Staff Software Engineer reports to the Head of AI and Innovation.
• Enable end-to-end customer-facing Digital Experience platform, including authentication, the API gateway, the unified data layer, fraud and identity, and the application layer on top.
• Shape an outcome-based delivery model for the Digital Experience Center of Excellence: tie engineering investment to measurable customer and business outcomes, validate impact after launch, and prioritize platform work by the outcomes it unlocks.
• Set technical direction, patterns, and engineering standards for the Digital Experience Center of Excellence, including coordination with the Senior Software Engineer leading our internal Experience Center build.
• Lead the hardest design work, and personally own the most critical and complex systems.
• Stay hands-on as an individual contributor: write, review, and ship production code; pair with engineers across both pillars; lead incident response on the most consequential systems.
• Partner with our Enterprise Solution Architects on enterprise-level architecture decisions (auth and identity, API and integration strategy, data architecture, fraud, vendor selection) and represent Digital Experience engineering in those conversations.
• Architect integrations with our core policy administration systems, our fraud and identity providers, our internal generative AI platform, and our identity providers.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex) at the team and Center of Excellence level, including the patterns, guardrails, and reviews that make AI-assisted development safe and productive in regulated software.
• Mentor Software Engineers across both the Digital Experience and the Experience Center pillars, and act as the technical career model for our IC track.
• Establish performance, reliability, security, and accessibility targets for the platform, and own the engineering practice that keeps us within them.
• Identify, prioritize, and act on technical debt, platform reuse, and developer productivity work that compound team velocity over time.
• Communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risk clearly to engineering leadership, product partners, and senior business and technology stakeholders.
What We’re Looking For:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial time as a Staff or Principal individual contributor on a customer-facing product or platform.
• Demonstrated experience owning the architecture of a non-trivial customer-facing system end to end on AWS, including serverless (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, CloudFront, S3, DynamoDB or RDS) and modern CI/CD.
• Strong, current working experience with Snowflake or a comparable cloud data warehouse, including data modeling, performance tuning, and integration with application services.
• Daily, fluent use of AI-assisted coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent), and a track record of helping a