Lead Cloud-Native Payment Systems Engineer

American Family Insurance; Madison (WI); Hybrid; USD 131,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

401(k) plan

Pension plan

Annual incentive

Holidays & PTO

Student loan repayment

Paid family leave

Job summary

American Family Insurance’s Payment Technology team seeks a Lead Application Development Engineer to drive secure, scalable payment solutions enterprise-wide. You will guide architecture, mentor engineers, and move legacy systems toward cloud-native, event-driven designs while collaborating with product, architecture, and business teams.

You will lead coding efforts, shape designs, and ensure production readiness, security, and high reliability, with hybrid work options and relocation support

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.
• Approximately 10+ years in software engineering, application development, or enterprise solution delivery, including 7+ years with Java, Spring Boot, or comparable backend technologies.
• 5+ years building and deploying cloud-native applications, ideally on AWS, using microservices, REST APIs, event-driven architecture, and distributed systems.
• Experience modernizing legacy or high-volume transactional applications; payment-platform or financial-services experience is helpful but not required.
• Experience with AWS services, containers, CI/CD, IaC, automated testing, observability, security, and resilient production operations.
• Ability to turn business needs into scalable technical designs and use AI-assisted tools or cloud AI services to improve engineering quality and efficiency.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through mentoring, architecture and code reviews, stakeholder influence, and delivery of customer-focused outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for secure, scalable payment applications—from early concepts and architecture through implementation and production.
• Shape the future of our payment platform by modernizing legacy solutions with cloud-native, microservices, API, event-driven, and distributed-system patterns.
• Turn complex needs into practical solutions by partnering with product, architecture, engineering, and business teams to define designs and delivery plans.
• Stay close to the code, leading development for complex or high-risk capabilities and solving challenges across integrations and dependencies.
• Set the standard for engineering excellence across design, testing, security, observability, performance, documentation, and production readiness.
• Grow the team’s technical capabilities by mentoring engineers, guiding key decisions, and linking work to meaningful customer outcomes.

Skills

Customer-driven solutions

Complex software/systems

Technical leadership

Mentoring engineers

Java

Spring Boot

AWS

Cloud-native architectures

API design

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Observability tools

Job description

American Family Insurance’s Payment Technology team seeks a Lead Application Development Engineer to drive secure, scalable payment solutions enterprise-wide. You will guide architecture, mentor engineers, and move legacy systems toward cloud-native, event-driven designs while collaborating with product, architecture, and business teams.

You will lead coding efforts, shape designs, and ensure production readiness, security, and high reliability, with hybrid work options and relocation support