Principal Software Engineer

$125,000 - $180,000 + VIP Bonus

The insurance industry runs on Vertafore. We equip agencies, MGAs, and carriers with the core digital systems, specialized AI, and data-driven foundation to eliminate distribution drag across the insurance lifecycle, spanning sales, servicing, and back-office operations.

Underpinned by unmatched speed and performance power, we are the trusted backbone that’s taking the insurance industry from friction to flow with Distribution Velocity – speed, performance, and trust - to drive growth at scale.

With over 95% of the top agencies and insurers and 50% of industry compliance transactions running through Vertafore, we lead at the intersection of innovation and trust, giving insurance professionals the confidence to transform and win in the AI era.

Our reach is global, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and offices across the U.S., Canada, and India.

The Principal Software Engineer helps shape the future of our technology platforms and lead how we build software in an AI-native world.

As a senior technical leader who stays hands-on. This role set architectural direction, personally take on our hardest engineering problems, and show what an engineering organization can achieve when engineering excellence and AI are leveraged together.

The role works closely with Product and Engineering leadership so that what we build delivers real value to our customers.

Core Duties and Responsibilities:

• Design and guide scalable, secure, resilient architectures, making the tradeoffs between speed, quality, and long-term sustainability.
• Lead the modernization of legacy platforms toward cloud-native, API-first, and AI-enabled architectures.
• Identify and address technical debt, architectural risk, and performance bottlenecks early.
• Shape long-term technology strategy, and evaluate emerging technologies through hands-on experiments and proofs of concept.
• Stay hands-on in design, implementation, prototyping, and debugging, and personally take on our most complex problems.
• Build reference implementations, reusable components, and shared frameworks that speed up teams across the organization.
• Own technical outcomes, not just recommendations, with high standards for security, performance, reliability, and observability.
• Define engineering standards and design principles, and lead design reviews that encourage constructive debate.
• Mentor senior engineers, architects, and emerging technical leaders.
• Influence decisions across teams without direct authority, and partner with Product, Architecture, and Security to turn business strategy into technical plans.

·         Other duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

·         Advanced communication and interpersonal skills.

·         Ability to facilitate productive discussions and resolve complex challenges.

·         Strong analytical, critical-thinking, and problem-solving capabilities.

·         Curiosity and commitment to continuous learning and professional development.

·         Ability to establish, communicate, and promote adherence to technical standards and quality practices.

·         Strategic decision-making skills with a focus on maintainability, scalability, security, and performance.

·         Ability to collaborate effectively with globally distributed teams.

·         Knowledge of high-performance and high-availability application design principles.

·         Proficiency with multiple database technologies.

·         Strong software design and implementation capabilities at the enterprise level.

·         Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

·         Ability to explain and defend technical decisions and architectural approaches.

·         Leadership and mentoring capabilities across multiple teams.

·         Ability to partner with business stakeholders to design practical technology solutions.

Qualifications:

·         10+ years of professional software engineering, with deep expertise in at least one of Java, C#/.NET, Node.js/JavaScript, or Python.

·         A track record of designing and delivering large-scale enterprise systems, grounded in architecture, distributed systems, and APIs.

·         Significant experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing direction across multiple teams.

·         Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools, and evidence that you've improved how teams work through automation.

·         Production experience with cloud platforms, ideally AWS.

·         Clear communication with both technical and nontechnical audiences.

·         A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Areas of depth

Our platform spans a wide range of technologies, and we don't expect anyone to be an expert in all of them. We're looking for real depth in several of these areas and the curiosity to grow in the rest.

• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS services such as EKS, ECS, and EC2; containerization; cloud-native architecture.
• DevOps and delivery: CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, observability, and DevSecOps.
• Data: relational databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server, including SQL development and performance tuning.
• Frontend: modern UI frameworks such as React or Angular.
• Modernization: evolving large-scale legacy applications into modern platforms.
• Applied AI: LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, and agentic workflows.
• Platform engineering: shared services, internal platforms, and developer productivity tools.
• Regulated environments: sensitive customer data, compliance requirements, and enterprise SaaS.

Additional Requirements and Details:

·         Travel required up to 10% of the time.

·         Flexible hybrid work arrangement.

·         Occasional lifting and/or moving up to 10 pounds.

·         Frequent repetitive hand and arm movements required to operate a computer.

·         Specific vision abilities required include close vision for computer-based work.

·         Frequent sitting and/or standing.