Lead Software Engineer

Guided by our core values and commitment to your success, we provide health, financial and lifestyle benefits to ensure a best-in-class employee experience. Some of our offerings include:

• Highly competitive total rewards package, including comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits as well as a 401(k) plan that both the employee and employer contribute
• Annual incentive bonus plan based on company achievement of goals
• Time away from work including paid holidays, paid time off and volunteer time off
• Professional development courses, mentorship opportunities, and tuition reimbursement program
• Paid parental leave and adoption leave with adoption financial assistance
• Employee discount program

Job Description Summary: The Lead Software Engineer provides expert advice and counsel to users, management, and IT teams for moderately complex systems. This is a lead role within the Application Development team, bringing crucial leadership and technical expertise to the software product development process. Their insights contribute to the strategic direction of technology within the enterprise. They drive system governance, ensure adherence to programming best practices, address production issues in a timely manner, and write system documentation. Our ideal candidate will be recognized as a technical expert within IT and the organization in systems design and analysis for the suite of applications supported. The candidate for this position must reside in the Kansas City Metropolitan area. Job Description

• Works in a complex environment on multiple projects and initiatives with competing timelines to deliver solutions that bring value to the business.
• Drives scope of work estimation and forecasting.
• Architects solutions to development and design problems.
• Coordinates with technical engineers across the domain and enterprise, ensuring that technology standards and processes are followed. Gathers, develops, and/or applies industry and architecture best practices.
• Writes high-quality code that satisfies customer needs and strives for reusability, simplicity, clarity, and testability.
• Participates in the creation of development practices and processes, to include architecture, design, implementation, and security standards and best practices.
• Accountable for the code quality of a given solution.
• Implements unit and integration tests and conduct functional and performance testing where appropriate.
• Creates and maintains documentation for platform governance, architecture, and coding standards.
• Leads root cause analysis; drives quality improvement.
• Collaborates with end-user community and executive stakeholders to understand pain points and to develop long-terms plans to fill those gaps.
• Promotes technical solutions from development, through testing, to the production environment following established processes.
• Participates in Agile ceremonies, such as daily stand-ups, iteration planning, demos, retrospectives, program increment planning, etc.
• Ensures regular communication of progress against development commitments
• Manages and supports development and testing of software releases and upgrades. Provides ongoing direction and support of the platforms, including architecture, development, best practices, efficient design, etc.
• Acts as on-call escalation for issues.
• Promotes a collaborative team environment, coaching and mentoring senior software engineers.
• Researches new technologies and evaluates how to apply them.
• Participates in reviews of component designs to ensure best usage of the proposed architecture.
• Contributes to long-term roadmap and planning activities against the execution of defined strategies and vision.
• Monitors technical debt and creates long-term plan for remediation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 12+ years' experience in software and application development with thorough knowledge in one or more coding languages (e.g. Javascript, C#, Python, Java) and one or more coding frameworks (e.g. .NET, ASP.NET / Core, Angular JS).
• 6+ years experience in Microsoft SQL Server, performing data analysis, writing SQL queries, creating stored procedures, and performance tuning.
• 8+ years experience developing custom workflows, creating plug-ins, and migrating/integrating data via SSIS, web services (SOAP/REST), and APIs.
• Expert understanding of development processes and the full software development lifecycle; Advanced knowledge of Agile methodologies.
• Advanced experience with development platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, Salesforce, Pega, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Growth mindset and a willingness to learn new skills, technologies, and frameworks.
• Ability to work both independently and on a team.
• Excellent process orientation, planning, organizational, and problem-solving skills with the demonstrated ability to design effective business solutions.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, including leadership, diplomacy, and negotiation with customers and senior executives.
• Advanced understanding of troubleshooting techniques, recovery options, monitoring, and system protections for on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
• Advanced knowledge of DevOps and CI/CD principles and practices.
• 2+ years in a professional, senior technical role, such as technical lead, architect, or other hands-on leadership role.
• 2+ years' experience in IT architecture.
• 5+ years' experience in Object-Oriented Design (OOD), Unified Modeling Language (UML), stateless distributed architectures, and designing for scalability and performance.
• Thorough knowledge of technologies in use within the organization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in Healthcare or similar industry preferred.
• 5+ years' experience leading a development team (formally or informally).
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, among other things, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, status as a protected veteran, or disability.

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