Staff Software Engineer

Symetra is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for the design and delivery of a new cloud-native platform. The role combines hands-on software development with cross-team architecture, engineering standards, risk management, mentoring, and production reliability work.

Responsibilities:

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across the design, development, testing, deployment, and operation of platform capabilities
• Partner with Architecture, Engineering, and Product to translate business capabilities and architectural direction into pragmatic, executable technical designs
• Make and influence technical decisions involving application architecture, integration patterns, APIs, data flows, reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability
• Lead technical design discussions and help teams evaluate tradeoffs rather than defaulting to a single solution or technology
• Develop production-quality software while remaining close enough to implementation to understand the realities facing engineering teams
• Establish and reinforce engineering standards and practices across software design, code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and production readiness
• Identify architectural, technical, integration, and delivery risks early and drive them toward resolution
• Work across multiple engineering teams to maintain technical consistency while allowing teams appropriate autonomy in implementation
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raise the technical capability of the broader organization, and help develop future technical leaders
• Create clear technical artifacts, including design documents, architecture decision records, technical plans, and other documentation needed to make important decisions durable and understandable
• Partner with engineering leadership to improve technical planning, decomposition, dependency management, and delivery predictability
• Help establish sustainable engineering practices that enable teams to deliver quickly without creating unnecessary operational or technical debt
• Participate in production support and continuously improve the reliability, observability, and operability of the platform
• Provide technical leadership across a blended engineering model consisting of FTEs, contractors, and onshore/offshore vendor teams
• Work directly with vendor technical leads and engineers to ensure solutions align with established architecture, engineering standards, and long-term platform direction
• Review and challenge vendor-proposed designs and technical approaches when appropriate, using engineering evidence, tradeoffs, and platform needs to drive decisions
• Help ensure critical technical knowledge, architectural decisions, and engineering ownership remain within the organization rather than becoming dependent on individual vendors or delivery partners
• Support onboarding and technical integration of new engineering teams as the organization scales, creating patterns and practices that can be reused across teams

Requirements:

• This role requires someone who can move comfortably between architecture and implementation, make pragmatic technical decisions, identify risks early, and help multiple engineering teams deliver effectively without sacrificing long-term system quality
• The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering expertise with strong technical leadership and systems thinking
• They should be comfortable working in a complex distributed environment, influencing technical direction across organizational boundaries, challenging assumptions constructively, and turning ambiguous problems into clear technical approaches
• They should be equally comfortable designing a system, writing production code, reviewing another team's architecture, mentoring engineers, and explaining technical tradeoffs to engineering and non-engineering partners
• 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