Application Engineering Manager

Be Here. Be Great. Working for a leader in the insurance industry means opportunity for you. Great American Insurance Group's member companies are subsidiaries of American Financial Group. We combine a "small company" culture where your ideas will be heard with "big company" expertise to help you succeed. With over 30 specialty and property and casualty operations, there are always opportunities here to learn and grow.

At Great American, we value and recognize the benefits derived when people with different backgrounds and experiences work together to achieve business results. Our goal is to create a workplace where all employees feel included, empowered, and enabled to perform at their best.

This position is not eligible for employment visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future sponsorship.

P&C IT Services provides professional services to help our business units and corporate functions use technology to create, manage, and optimize information and business processes. IT Services can include a wide range of activities such as: software development, data management, Cloud services, IT security, network security, technical support, establishing and overseeing access rights, procuring and maintaining equipment or software, managing the infrastructure, and defining security procedures, The overall goal of IT Services is to provide technology solutions that increase efficiency, reduce costs, and give our company a competitive advantage over our competitors.

Great American's culture is built on connection, shared learning, and strong relationships. This is a hybrid role that combines in-office and remote work. Employees are expected to maintain a meaningful on-site presence to support collaboration, relationship building, and business success.

The Agent & Insured Digital Experience (AIE) team is seeking a results-oriented Application Engineering Supervisor to provide people leadership, technical guidance, and day-to-day delivery support for a team of application engineers. The AIE team is responsible for Great American's externally facing Agent and Insured Portals, providing critical digital self-service experiences for agents and policyholders.

This individual will partner closely with product leaders, the Delivery Manager, Technical Product Managers, architects, and cross-functional delivery teams to translate business priorities into secure, reliable, maintainable, and production-ready technology solutions. The Application Engineering Supervisor coordinates team priorities, coaches and develops engineers, promotes strong engineering practices, and remains actively engaged in technical delivery and problem-solving.

This is a working leadership position that combines direct people management with hands-on application engineering responsibilities. The Application Engineering Supervisor may contribute to application design, development, pair programming, code review, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support while helping the team deliver quality outcomes from feature definition through ongoing sustainment.

Essential Job Functions and Responsibilities

• Coordinates the daily operations of the Application Engineering team, optimizing workflows and supporting efficient, predictable delivery.
• Provides direct supervision, coaching, feedback, mentorship, and professional development support to application engineers and participates in decisions involving talent selection, recognition, development, and performance management.
• Serves as a working technical leader and team Anchor by providing day-to-day technical direction, reinforcing engineering standards, facilitating collaboration, and contributing directly to application design, development, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support when appropriate.
• Leads and contributes to the design, development, integration, testing, deployment, maintenance, and evolution of software applications and systems supporting business and insurance processes.
• Reviews technical specifications, feature requirements, and acceptance criteria to identify gaps, dependencies, risks, edge cases, and implementation considerations before development begins.
• Guides and reviews technical decisions, code, and deliverables involving application architecture, implementation patterns, APIs, integrations, data flow, error handling, security, performance, scalability, testability, maintainability, and operational support.
• Cultivates a collaborative environment across development, operations, product, quality assurance, architecture, and business teams to design and implement solutions that improve system interoperability, delivery outcomes, operational effectiveness, and the user experience.
• Promotes collaborative engineering practices, including pair programming, code review, shared problem-solving, knowledge transfer, and collective code ownership.
• Ensures software changes include testing appropriate to their risk and complexity, along with necessary documentation, security controls, logging, monitoring, error handling, deployment planning, and recovery considerations.
• Coordinates with Quality Assurance, Release Management, Production Support, architecture, and other delivery partners to support release planning, implementation, validation, and post-release monitoring, including preparing and reviewing applicable release, support, and recovery artifacts.
• Monitors application performance and reliability and promotes meaningful logging, telemetry, performance monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and actionable alerting to identify and resolve issues affecting system efficiency, availability, or the user experience.
• Provides technical leadership and expert support during complex application issues and production incidents, including triage, mitigation, troubleshooting, recovery, root-cause analysis, and preventive follow-up.
• Communicates delivery progress, technical concerns, blockers, resource constraints, dependencies, and risks clearly and early.
• Identifies and helps implement improvements to engineering practices, delivery processes, documentation, automation, testing, release management, and production support.
• Identifies technical debt, application risks, and modernization opportunities and works with Application Engineering management, architects, and product partners to recommend pragmatic solutions.
• Supports adherence to established software development lifecycle practices, security baselines, architectural standards, data privacy requirements, change management processes, and operational controls.
• Leverages AI-powered tools responsibly to support software development, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, process analysis, and data interpretation; identifies patterns, gaps, risks, and improvement opportunities while maintaining appropriate human review and complying with company policies related to data privacy, security, intellectual property, and responsible AI usage.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Skills & Competencies

• People leadership, coaching, and employee development
• Hands-on application engineering, technical leadership, and sound engineering judgment
• Advanced proficiency with Java, Spring Boot, microservices, RESTful APIs, integrations, databases, application architecture, and modern development frameworks
• Agile software development using methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming
• Pair programming, code review, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem-solving
• Requirements analysis and identification of technical gaps, dependencies, risks, and edge cases
• Software testing, quality engineering, CI/CD, release management, deployment, validation, recovery, and production-readiness practices
• Application performance, observability, logging, telemetry, synthetic monitoring, incident response, production troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis
• Security, data privacy, risk management, and responsible AI usage
• Process improvement, automation, and application modernization
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, prioritization, organizational, and time-management skills
• Clear and effective communication and cross-functional collaboration
• Ability to see the big picture while maintaining focus on delivery details
• Adaptability, continuous learning, customer focus, and results orientation

Scope of Job:

• Functions as a first-line people leader responsible for the daily coordination, coaching, development, and performance of an Application Engineering team and participates in decisions regarding talent selection, recognition, development, and performance management.
• Balances direct supervisory responsibilities with hands-on technical participation and may perform application engineering work alongside team members to support delivery, resolve complex issues, maintain technical proficiency, or develop team capabilities.
• Operates under established policies, procedures, engineering standards, and organizational direction with limited oversight.
• Oversees team priorities and coordinates daily work, applying sound judgment when balancing business needs, customer outcomes, delivery commitments, technical quality, team capacity, production support, and operational risk.
• Maintains advanced technical proficiency and provides expertise across Java, Spring Boot, microservices, RESTful APIs, distributed systems, integrations, cloud platforms, databases, automated testing, observability, security, and production-support practices.
• Demonstrates an understanding of machine learning and generative AI concepts and their implications for software engineering, security, privacy, quality, and maintainability.
• Helps ensure the team meets established delivery, quality, performance, operational, and budget expectations.
• Communicates effectively with technical and nontechnical audiences and escalates issues appropriately when they cannot be resolved within the team.

Job Requirements

Education: Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field/experience.

Experience: Generally, a minimum of six years of experience in software development, software engineering, and/or application engineering, including experience providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers, coordinating software delivery, or serving in an Anchor, team-lead, or comparable leadership capacity.

Required Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience designing, developing, testing, deploying, and supporting Java-based microservices.
• Strong experience with Java and Spring Boot.
• Experience building and integrating RESTful APIs and distributed applications.
• Experience applying software engineering practices across the full software development lifecycle, including automated testing, code review, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Experience applying secure software development practices, including identity, authentication, authorization, data privacy, vulnerability remediation, and security controls.

Preferred/Bonus Qualifications:

• Previous formal experience supervising an Application Engineering or software development team.
• Experience supporting externally facing portals, digital self-service applications, or other high-availability customer experiences.
• Property and Casualty insurance or other relevant insurance-industry experience.
• Experience with Vue.js, React, or similar modern front-end frameworks.
• Experience deploying and operating containerized applications using Kubernetes.
• Experience developing reactive Java applications and microservices using Spring WebFlux.
• Experience building event-driven integrations and distributed systems.
• Experience with Azure, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Tanzu Application Service, or comparable cloud and application-platform technologies.
• Experience with SQL Server, Oracle, Snowflake, or similar relational and cloud data technologies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git-based development, automated testing, feature flags, and modern release practices.
• Experience with application observability, synthetic monitoring, centralized logging, and performance-analysis tools.
• Experience using Rally or a similar Agile development tracking tool.
• Experience with GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, OpenAI technologies, or similar AI-enabled engineering tools.

Business Unit:

Property & Casualty IT Services

Benefits:

We offer competitive benefits packages for full-time and part-time employees*. Full-time employees have access to medical, dental, and vision coverage, wellness plans, parental leave, adoption assistance, and tuition reimbursement. Full-time and eligible part-time employees also enjoy Paid Time Off and paid holidays, a 401(k) plan with company match, an employee stock purchase plan, and commuter benefits.

Compensation varies by role, level, and location and is influenced by skills, experience, and business needs. Your recruiter will provide details about benefits and specific compensation ranges during the hiring process. Learn more at http://www.gaig.com/careers.

• Excludes seasonal employees and interns.