Platform Engineer - Enterprise Data Services (Principal / Staff Engineer)

Why Wellmark: We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we’ve built our reputation on over 80 years’ worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors–our members. If you’re passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today!   

Why Wellmark Technology? Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work. 

At Wellmark, we’re building the next generation of secure, scalable, and reusable data services to that service as the foundation for enterprise-wide innovation. As a Platform Engineer on the Enterprise Data Services team, you’ll drive the design and delivery of complex, event-driven microservices using AWS serverless architecture. 

This role is both hands-on and strategic. You’ll collaborate closely with architects, product leaders, and development teams to shape high-impact solutions that support critical domains like benefits, group, and member services. You’ll help establish shared architecture patterns, optimize for performance and availability, and ensure solutions align with enterprise standards for security, resilience, observability and supportability. 

As a technical leader, you’ll mentor engineers, contribute to cross-team design efforts, and serve as a subject matter expert on cloud-native platforms. You’ll also provide input into business process improvements and help evaluate emerging technologies and development tools that can advance our engineering practice and platform maturity. 

What You’ll Do:

• Lead the design and development of enterprise-scale, event-driven microservices and real-time data streaming pipelines using AWS serverless architecture (Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS/SNS) and streaming technologies such as Kafka or Amazon Kinesis. Collaborate with architects, product managers, and cross-functional engineering teams to deliver reusable data and platform services that power key domains like benefits, group, and member services. 
• Shape system design decisions, data modeling strategies, and platform standards to ensure performance, resilience, and security at scale. 
• Implement CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, and monitoring practices to support reliable deployments and ongoing service health. 
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code development using tools like AWS CDK to streamline provisioning and environment consistency. 

You Will Be Successful In This Role By: 

• Mentoring other developers and raising the bar on design reviews, code quality, and testing practices across teams. 
• Collaborating effectively with architecture and business stakeholders to align technical plans with strategic goals. 
• Taking ownership of platform and service domains, from early design through production support and lifecycle maintenance. 
• Contributing to a culture of continuous learning, engineering excellence, and innovation in service design. 
• Staying curious—exploring emerging tools and AWS services that can improve performance, scalability, or developer experience. 

Preferred Experience You Would Bring To The Team: 

• Proven experience developing backend services in production environments using Node.js and/or Python. 
• 3+ years of experience with AWS services, particularly Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, EventBridge, and AWS Batch. 
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, distributed systems, and microservice design patterns. 
• Proficiency with SQL and hands-on experience with relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, DynamoDB). 
• Familiarity with CI/CD workflows, automated testing (e.g., Jest), and integration test strategies using Docker. 
• A collaborative mindset, strong communication skills, and a passion for mentoring and growing others. 
• Experience working within an Agile team environment and a product-focused organization delivering incrementally and iteratively. 
• Demonstrated technical leadership through architecture design ownership, code reviews, and mentorship across teams and domains. 
• Proven ability to serve as a technical point of contact across cross-functional teams, guiding implementation and resolving design challenges. 
• Hands-on experience with AWS CDK or similar infrastructure-as-code tools to provision and manage cloud-native services. 
• Familiarity with designing event-driven architectures using services like EventBridge, SNS/SQS, or Kafka/Kinesis. 
• Experience building and supporting real-time data pipelines or streaming integrations in production environments. 
• Strong understanding of secure-by-design principles and practical experience embedding security into cloud-native service design.  
• Experience delivering microservices and serverless applications on AWS using Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora, DynamoDB, and related services. 
• Prior exposure to regulated environments such as healthcare or insurance, and understanding of compliance standards like HIPAA or SOC2. 
• AWS certification (e.g., Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer) is a plus 

Required Experience to be considered: 

• Bachelor's Degree or direct and applicable work experience 
• Minimum 7 years of experience to include any combination of the following: 
  • Development Experience: (Ex: Angular 2 (or newer), NodeJS (or newer), Python, TypeScript, C#, .NET, Java, SQL) 
  • Providing innovative solutions to complex issues 
• Minimum 4 years of experience in IT infrastructure, architecture design, and operations 
• Proven ability to adapt when experiencing major changes in work tasks or work environments. 
• Informal leadership experience typically gained through leading projects. 
• Demonstrated experience coaching/mentoring others by providing guidance and feedback to help an employee or groups of employees strengthen their knowledge and skills to accomplish a task or solve a problem 
• Proven experience with designing technical architecture and keeping abreast of existing and emerging technologies. 
• Experiencing consulting with stakeholders to understand needs with the intention of providing advice and counsel. Also interacting appropriately with others to guide individuals or groups to accomplish work, reach consensus or take action. 
• Demonstrated experience in problem solving/troubleshooting skills (conceptual, technical, IT) - Breaks down problems and identifies all of their facets, including hidden or tricky aspects, to find root-cause of problems. Generates a range of solutions and courses of action with benefits, costs, and risks associated with each. Probes appropriate sources for answers, and thinks ‘outside the box’ to find options. Tests proposed solutions against the reality of likely effects before going forward. 
• Demonstrated communication skills: verbal and written - Articulate; Communicates information/concepts clearly and concisely to individuals or groups; delivers presentations suited to the characteristics and needs of the stakeholders/audience. Clearly and concisely conveys written information orally or in writing to individuals or groups to ensure that they understand the information and the message. Listens and responds appropriately to others. 

a.  Lead the technical designs for highly integrated complex application platforms to optimize security, information leverage and re-use, integration, performance, and availability and ensure solutions developed adhere and aligns to the architecture standards. Fulfill service level agreements and ensure solutions remains current with industry best practices, technologies and with Wellmark’s standards. 

b.  Consult with Solution Architects and project teams in the creation & documentation of design deliverables for application platforms.  Collaborate with Solution and Lead Architects to design and implement effective technology solutions, while using innovative business and technology processes to identify and implement improvement initiatives, eliminate redundancies and maximizes re-use of applications. 

c.  May oversee and lead planning, developing and estimating of technical solutions. When appropriate, collaborate and work with other technical teams in to better provide subject matter expertise and insights. 

d.  Collaborate with Lead Architect for assigned domain, business systems analyst and other stakeholders to provide insight/ direction regarding process improvements. 

e.  Consults with business stakeholders regarding subject matter knowledge related to technical planning in order to ensure architectures are developed in alignment with business expectations. 

f.  Oversee, review and provide technical guidance on the design efforts of Wellmark’s supported solutions; including but not limited to the evaluation of vendors during the selection process, integrating with new vendors, design, implementation and administration. 

g.  Will adhere and are held accountable for the support and influence of Wellmark’s architecture governance standards and technical standards. Provide design specifications to governing boards for proper approvals. Provides guidance for regarding IT policies, security and infrastructure. 

h.  Will provide training and mentorship of others regarding technical design and solution implementation; including review and quality assurance. 

i.  Build strong relationships and business acumen with the business to ensure technical designs are aligned with business needs.  Provide exceptional customer service and solutions. 

j.  Develops and applies industry best practice technology, design and methodology approaches to design platform specific technical designs. Researches and recommends new emerging technologies, techniques and tools that will add value to the organization. 

k.  Other duties as assigned. 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

The policy of Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is to recruit, hire, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law.

Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability at any stage of the employment application process should contact us at [email protected]

Please inform us if you meet the definition of a "Covered DoD official".