Lead Software Engineer - Internal Developer Platform & Developer Experience

Wellmark is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to advance its internal developer platform and developer experience capabilities. In this onsite role in Des Moines, IA, you will lead design, development, and ongoing evolution of platform initiatives that help engineering teams adopt standards, reduce friction, and improve delivery outcomes for business and technology initiatives.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of complex internal developer platform capabilities that support Wellmark’s business and technology priorities.
• Serve as a technical leader for developer experience, software catalogs, platform integrations, self-service experiences, and engineering enablement.
• Ensure solutions align with business expectations, Wellmark standards, architecture principles, and security requirements.
• Act as a consultant to Wellmark leaders on platform capabilities, engineering delivery challenges, process improvements, and technology enhancements.
• Provide direction for enterprise standards, conduct code reviews, and monitor adherence to those standards.
• Lead highly complex program work, including analysis and development of workflows that use emerging technology to meet evolving business needs.
• Build and improve innovative, secure, scalable, and cost-effective capabilities used across multiple applications, systems, and engineering teams.
• Develop health checks, scorecards, campaigns, templates, reference implementations, documentation, automation, and self-service capabilities to increase visibility and enable adoption of preferred engineering practices.
• Apply a product mindset by gathering developer feedback, understanding developer journeys, contributing to the platform roadmap, and defining measures for platform health, adoption, reliability, effectiveness, and developer experience outcomes.
• Operate, support, monitor, and continuously improve internal developer platform capabilities.
• Partner with application engineering, cloud, security, architecture, operations, quality engineering, and other technology teams to integrate platform capabilities, products, and processes.
• Lead platform roadmap development, capability assessments, project proposals, estimates, and proof-of-concept activities as needed.
• Maintain awareness of industry best practices and participate in relevant knowledge-sharing groups.
• Support training, guidance, and technical leadership for gathering information, performing root cause analysis, defining problems, verifying outcomes, and optimizing solutions.
• Mentor and problem-solve with other technology areas, including how to use new or enhanced applications.

Developer experience scope: connect source control, cloud platforms, CI/CD systems, application portfolio information, documentation, security, and other engineering systems to provide a unified developer experience with clear metadata, ownership, and system relationships.

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, MIS, or related field and at least five years of software engineering experience, or nine years of related and applicable experience.
• Strong analytical problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Demonstrated experience across software development lifecycle methodologies.
• Ability to communicate and coach/mentor team members.
• Root cause analysis skills and ability to recommend solutions using data.
• Strong relationship-building and stakeholder communication skills.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities.
• Continuous learning mindset with awareness of industry trends.
• Ability to collaborate within a diverse development team model.
• Demonstrated experience leading cross-team technical initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, integrating, or supporting platform capabilities used by multiple engineering teams.

Technologies

• AWS services
• APIs and SDKs
• Infrastructure as code
• Source control
• Cloud platforms
• CI/CD systems
• Security tooling
• Observability solutions
• Service management systems
• Enterprise data sources
• Documentation, monitoring, templates, automation

Preferred

• Experience working within Agile product delivery or software engineering environments.
• Experience building or supporting internal developer platforms, developer portals, and self-service engineering capabilities.
• Experience developing internal developer platform integrations, automation, and self-service capabilities using AWS services, APIs, SDKs, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience integrating internal developer platforms with source control, cloud platforms, CI/CD systems, security tooling, documentation, observability solutions, service management systems, and enterprise data sources.
• Experience designing software catalogs, scorecards, health checks, or similar platform capabilities.
• Experience developing self-service workflows, templates, automation, documentation, and onboarding capabilities that improve developer productivity and platform adoption.
• Experience identifying developer friction and driving measurable improvements across developer journeys, tools, processes, platforms, and teams.
• Experience using platform health, adoption, usage, reliability, or developer productivity measures to identify opportunities and evaluate outcomes.
• Experience operating and continuously improving an internal engineering platform, including monitoring, troubleshooting, documentation, and service ownership.
• Experience applying product management principles to internal engineering platforms, including gathering developer feedback, prioritizing capabilities, and measuring platform adoption, effectiveness, and alignment with engineering standards.