Senior Software Engineering Leader | Delivery & Architecture

Northwestern Mutual; Milwaukee (WI); On-site; USD 176,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwestern Mutual is seeking an Assistant Director, Software Engineering (People Leader) to own end-to-end technical quality and delivery across UI, services, and data platforms. You will lead engineers directly while partnering with Product Managers, Architects, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

You are both a technical authority and a people leader, setting direction, raising standards, and developing engineering talent.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software and data engineering experience.
• Experience leading engineers directly or readiness to step into people leadership.
• Strong experience building modern web applications with React.
• Strong experience designing REST APIs and data warehousing.
• Experience with security, observability, and enterprise-grade systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate technical direction for the Public Investments team.
• Translate product outcomes into technical designs and implementation plans.
• Lead solution design across front end, backend services, and data platforms.
• Drive decomposition and sequencing for applications, APIs, pipelines, and warehouse models.
• Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, CI/CD, and reliability.
• Own technical risk management including architecture and security risks.
• Ensure API and data integrations are documented and reusable.
• Guide data warehouse quality, transformations, and performance optimization.
• Support production stability through incident response and root-cause analysis.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Data platform

People leadership

React

REST APIs

Data warehousing

Security & observability

Mentoring engineers

Tools

dbt

Snowflake

CI/CD

Node.js

Job description

Northwestern Mutual is seeking an Assistant Director, Software Engineering (People Leader) to own end-to-end technical quality and delivery across UI, services, and data platforms. You will lead engineers directly while partnering with Product Managers, Architects, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

You are both a technical authority and a people leader, setting direction, raising standards, and developing engineering talent.