Principal Engineer

About the role

This role provides technical thought leadership across the insurance portfolio, guiding engineering teams through complex, existing systems while strengthening architecture, patterns, and code reusability. This position remains hands-on—digging into the code, improving how systems are designed, and applying strong engineering patterns rather than prescribing abstract or theoretical solutions.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Designing Solutions
  Apply expert industry knowledge and broad understanding of multiple disciplines with technical knowledge to drive outcomes for customers. Designs and evolves complex systems with an enterprise perspective, understanding dependencies, integration patterns, operational considerations, and downstream impacts across the insurance ecosystem.

• Implementing Solutions
  Uses independent, critical thinking to solve complex problems which are significant to the customer. Uses application and system data, as well as past experiences to inform decision making. Leader in technical expertise; Develops most architecturally impactful components of solutions.

• Learning and Applying New Techniques
  Continuously evaluates emerging technologies, engineering practices, and industry trends. Demonstrates curiosity and learning agility by rapidly assessing new approaches, determining business value, and helping the organization adopt innovations that improve outcomes. Challenges existing assumptions and drives continuous improvement by identifying opportunities to simplify, modernize, and transform technology solutions.

• Collaborating Within the Team
  Provide enterprise-wide technical leadership, influencing architectural direction, engineering practices, and technology investment decisions across multiple product domains. Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders while building organizational engineering capability. Participate in product planning and implementation. Helps product owner to create technical user stories as required/needed. Technical leader in system design across multiple teams; Provides broad and/or deep expertise in collaborating across teams to create solutions that lead to outcomes. Lead alignment across business and technology stakeholders, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term platform strategy to drive enterprise-scale outcomes.

• Collaborating Across Teams
  Promote cross team adherence to technology standards and target architecture. Technical leader in system design across multiple teams; Provides broad and/or deep expertise in collaborating across teams to create solutions that lead to outcomes. Broker solution design and implementation across product teams to achieve outcomes for the most critical technology and/or strategic priorities for the organization.

• Collaborating Across the Organization
  Evaluate architecture through the lens of scalability, resiliency, maintainability, security, operational excellence, and long-term business value across interconnected platforms. Shapes the long-term technology vision by identifying architectural investments, modernization opportunities, and platform capabilities that enable future business growth. Provides the feedback loop from teams back to operations as new requirements for operationalizing products become necessary. May do this through PoCs or full implementations.

• Setting Product/Platform Technology Strategy
  Define the high-level capabilities requirements for the product/platform and collaborate with the teams across the organization. Provide platform technology expertise to teams within product group as well as interdependent teams across the organization. Define and share engineering standards across internal teams and collaborate to help engineers apply these patterns to build solutions that achieve outcomes. Participates in external activities including open-source software contributions and meetups.

• DevOps
  Lead the resolution of critical incidents and provides technical leadership in proactively addressing critical production issues/outages. Able to assess and introduce technology to build more stable, scalable, and resilient software. Evaluate, recommend and execute new CI/CD components to make the products more stable for a given area. Build partnership across technical areas to influence when needed. Selecting and Managing Technology Vendors Consults on the evaluation process for software solutions - provides technical advise on how solutions play into the larger strategy of product areas. Contribute in criteria evaluation for selecting the right platforms and softwares for the product team.

• Coaching Engineers
  Provide guidance and reinforcement around established engineering best practices across product groups and the organization. Provide technical leadership and mentoring to other engineers across the organization. Provide trainings and demos to address knowledge gaps across teams and product groups.

• Recruiting and Building Talent
  Engage in the tech community to build the Thrivent technology brand and position as the employer of choice in the market. Contributes / helps in the recruitment process to hire the right engineering talent for the organization. Models Thrivent’s leadership competencies: Model the Way, Rally the Team, and Deliver Outcomes. Supports and/or develops an environment in which Thrivent employees and colleagues are focused on continuous improvement, exceptional employee engagement, and an unwavering commitment to our clients. Shapes and/or supports a culture that represents the Thrivent purpose, promise and values, ensuring that Thrivent’s trust and reputation remain strong with its clients.

Qualifications & Skills

• Required:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience
  • 10+ years of experience in an engineering role with demonstrated success leading complex enterprise initiatives across multiple product domains
  • 5+ years of experience leading high performing technology teams
  • Demonstrated ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences
  • Demonstrated participation and leadership in the broader technology community with proven ability to influence executive stakeholders and build alignment across diverse teams

• Preferred:

  • Financial Services industry experience

Pay Transparency
Thrivent’s long-term growth depends on attracting, rewarding, and retaining people who are committed to helping others thrive with purpose. We accomplish this by offering a wide variety of market competitive compensation programs to attract, reward, and retain top talent. The applicable salary or hourly wage range for this full-time role is $161,436.00 - $218,415.00 per year, which factors in various geographic regions. The base pay actually offered will be determined by a variety of factors including, but not limited to, location, relevant experience, skills, and knowledge, business needs, market demand, and other factors.