Staff Software Engineer

About the role: 

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across ILD engineering teams. This role shapes architecture and engineering strategy for critical systems, leads complex initiatives across team boundaries, and helps deliver measurable improvements in customer experience, operational efficiency, reliability, and speed to market. 

What you'll do: 

As a Staff Engineer, you will operate beyond the boundaries of a single team, connecting business priorities with technical strategy and execution. You will identify complex technical challenges, establish architectural direction, and help engineering teams make sound, sustainable technical decisions. 

You will combine deep technical expertise with strong communication, collaboration, and leadership skills. While you will remain hands-on with technology, your primary impact will come from enabling teams to move faster, improving the quality of technical decisions, and building systems and practices that scale with the organization. 

Key Responsibilities 

1. Technical Strategy and Direction

• Define and communicate technical vision, architecture, and engineering strategy for critical systems and cross-team initiatives. 

• Prioritize technical investments based on customer and distributor experience, operational efficiency, speed to market, system reliability, and long-term business value. 

• Identify architectural risks, scalability constraints, reliability gaps, and opportunities to simplify complex systems. 

• Drive decisions on system design, technology choices, engineering standards, and architectural trade-offs. 

• Develop pragmatic roadmaps for platform evolution, modernization, technical debt reduction, infrastructure optimizations, and cloud cost reductions. 

• Establish alignment across teams on shared technical principles and long-term direction. 

1. Cross-Team Technical Leadership

• Lead complex, high-impact engineering initiatives that span multiple teams and technical domains. 

• Break down ambiguous problems into actionable plans, establish clear ownership, and help teams make progress. 

• Coordinate technical decisions and dependencies across teams to ensure consistent, effective execution. 

• Identify organizational and technical bottlenecks and work with stakeholders to remove them. 

• Provide technical leadership during critical incidents, major migrations, and other high-risk initiatives. 

1. Architecture, Design, and Engineering Excellence

• Design and evolve scalable, secure, reliable, and maintainable software systems. 

• Establish architectural patterns, engineering standards, and best practices that improve consistency and quality. 

• Evaluate technical trade-offs across performance, reliability, security, cost, maintainability, and delivery speed.  

• Drive measurable improvements in software quality through automated testing, observability, secure development practices, and operational readiness. Use production incidents, escaped defects, and recurring failure patterns to guide improvements across teams. 

• Evaluate, improve, and guide adoption of engineering tools and shared workflows—including CI/CD, test automation, observability, development environments, and approved AI tools—to reduce friction, strengthen quality, and accelerate delivery. 

• Establish technical approaches for AI-enabled solutions that account for data quality, security, privacy, reliability, human oversight, and ongoing measurement. 

1. Mentorship and Technical Development

• Mentor Senior Engineers and other technical contributors to strengthen engineering capabilities across the organization. 

• Share knowledge through design reviews, technical discussions, documentation, and collaborative problem-solving. 

• Encourage a culture of technical excellence, constructive feedback, and continuous learning. 

1. Organizational Influence and Collaboration

• Partner with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and other stakeholders to shape technical and product decisions. 

• Represent engineering considerations in roadmap planning, prioritization, resource allocation, and organizational decisions. 

• Translate business problems into technical strategies and communicate trade-offs clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences. 

• Champion engineering investments that improve long-term organizational health and product sustainability. 

1. Exploration and Innovation

• Investigate ambiguous, high-impact technical or business problems where the appropriate solution is not yet clear. 

• Lead technical discovery, experimentation, and proofs of concept, including AI use cases, to validate business value, technical feasibility, and readiness for production adoption. 

• Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural options based on business value and practical feasibility. 

1. Hands-On Engineering and Delivery

• Contribute code, prototypes, technical designs, and proof-of-concepts where they provide meaningful leverage. 

• Review critical code changes and architectural proposals, focusing on correctness, maintainability, and long-term impact. 

• Remain connected to implementation realities by working directly with engineers and understanding production systems. 

• Unblock teams by resolving difficult technical problems and helping them navigate complex implementation decisions. 

• Ensure technical strategy translates into shipped outcomes and measurable improvements. 

Qualifications: 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent experience. 

• 10+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production software systems. 

• Demonstrated technical leadership at the Staff engineer level or equivalent, with a track record of driving complex, cross-team engineering initiatives 

• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, scalability, reliability, performance, and security. 

• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts and trade-offs to diverse audiences. 

• Experience mentoring engineers, sharing technical knowledge, and raising engineering standards. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Deep production experience with one or more languages such as Java, Go, or C++, and experience using Python or JavaScript for automation and tooling. 

• Experience designing, modernizing, and operating large-scale applications or similar experience 

• Demonstrated expertise in designing, implementing, and improving observability and monitoring practices across complex systems, including metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and incident response. 

• Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices. 

• Experience improving software quality and engineering effectiveness through shared tooling, automation, and development practices. 

Next section is nice to have 

What Success Looks Like 

Success in this role is measured by the impact of your technical leadership and the effectiveness of the teams you enable, rather than by individual code output alone. 

• Strategic alignment: Technical roadmaps and architectural decisions advance ILD priorities and deliver measurable customer, distributor, and operational value. 

• Engineering effectiveness: Teams make better technical decisions, resolve problems faster, and deliver with greater confidence. 

• System quality: Architecture, reliability, security, performance, and maintainability improve in measurable ways. 

• AI impact: Validated AI capabilities are adopted with appropriate oversight and deliver measurable improvements in engineering or business outcomes. 

• People development: Engineers grow in capability, ownership, and technical leadership through your mentorship. 

• Organizational influence: Engineering considerations are incorporated into important business and product decisions. 

• Long-term impact: Technical investments reduce future risk, improve scalability, and create sustained value for the organization. 

Our Expectations 

We expect a Staff Engineer to lead through technical judgment, collaboration, and influence. You will not own every implementation or make every decision yourself. Instead, you will help the organization identify the right problems, align on effective solutions, develop technical leaders, and deliver outcomes that would be difficult for any one team to achieve independently. 

The ultimate measure of success is not how much code you personally produce, but how much more effectively the engineering organization can build, operate, and evolve its systems because of your contributions. 

We empower inclusion
At Symetra, we aspire to be the most inclusive insurance company in the country. We're building a place where every employee feels valued, respected, and has opportunities to contribute.

Inclusion is about recognizing our assumptions, considering multiple perspective, and removing barriers. We accept and celebrate diverse experiences, identities, and perspectives, because lifting each other up fuels thought and builds a stronger, more innovative company. We invite you to learn more about our efforts here.

 

Creating a world where more people have access to financial freedom
Symetra is a national financial services company dedicated to helping people achieve their financial goals and feel confident about the future. In our daily work, we're guided by the principles of Value, Transparency and Sustainability. This means we provide products and services people need at a competitive price, we communicate clearly and openly so people understand what they're buying, and we design products--and operate our company--to stand the test of time. We're committed to showing up for our communities, lifting up our employees, and standing up for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Join our team and help us create a world where more people have access to financial freedom.

For more information about our careers visit: https://symetra.eightfold.ai/careers

 

Work Authorization
Employer work visa sponsorship and support are not provided for this role. Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States at hire and must maintain authorization to work in the United States throughout their employment with our company.

 

Please review Symetra's Remote Network Minimum Requirements:

As a remote-first organization committed to providing a positive experience for both employees and customers, Symetra has the following standards for employees' internet connection:

• Minimum Internet Speed:100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload, in alignment with the FCC's definition of "broadband."
• Internet Type:Fiber, Cable (e.g., Comcast, Spectrum), or DSL.
• Not Permissible:Satellite (e.g., Starlink), cellular broadband (hotspot or otherwise), any other wireless technology, or wired dial-up.

When applying to jobs at Symetra you'll be asked to test your internet speed and confirm that your internet connection meets or exceeds Symetra's standard as outlined above.

 

Identity Verification

Symetra is committed to fair and secure hiring practices. For all roles, candidates will be required (after the initial phone screen) to be on video for all interviews. Symetra will take affirmative steps at key points in the process to verify that a candidate is not seeking employment fraudulently, e.g. through use of a false identity.

 

Failure to comply with verification procedures may result in:

• Disqualification from the recruitment process
• Withdrawal of a job offer
• Termination of employment and other criminal and/or civil remedies, if fraud is discovered