Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer II Full Stack

Organization: First American Financial Corporation

Location: Remote

Role overview

The Senior Software Engineer II will work closely with the Engineering Manager, Architect, Product Manager and team to understand both stated and unstated needs, own a domain or technical system long-term, and autonomously deliver ongoing business impact through larger, multi-quarter initiatives.

The role is responsible for designing, developing, testing, and enhancing applications for First American. These applications are typically web-based and are developed in accordance with established coding standards and guidelines using a continuous Build-Integrate-Test approach within an Agile environment.

The Senior Software Engineer II will serve as a recognized domain technical authority—using deep business knowledge and strong engineering practices to improve functionality, performance, reliability, and maintainability while shaping technical direction and elevating team outcomes.

Key responsibilities

• Autonomously deliver ongoing business impact for the team, product capability, or technical system—leading larger, multi-quarter initiatives across the full SDLC from design through launch and rollout.
• Own a domain or technical system long-term; serve as a recognized domain expert and drive customer impact through technical direction and durable improvements.
• Make independent technical decisions for the team under open-ended requirements; partner with the Architect and Product Manager on roadmaps, trade-offs, and pragmatic solutions.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager, Architect, and Product Manager on long-term goals; identify when work is not moving the needle and redirect focus toward measurable outcomes.
• Lead one to two important projects concurrently; divide work for independent team execution and anticipate risks proactively.
• Define and maintain project plans for larger initiatives; establish milestones, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Define domain-level standards, patterns, and operational practices; steward elimination of tech debt, toil, and security issues across team-owned systems.
• Lead high-quality code reviews that coach others and elevate review culture; simplify team-owned systems and build tools or documentation others adopt.
• Design architecture and infrastructure patterns the team follows; make spike and MVP decisions and rally the team on scale, reliability, simplicity, and cost trade-offs.
• Serve as a primary driver on production issues and post-mortems; define and monitor SLAs/SLOs where applicable and deliver durable operational fixes, including scale improvements.
• Think systematically about evolution of production infrastructure, integrations, and cross-system dependencies across the domain.
• Drive cross-team coordination and stakeholder communication; eliminate systemic toil and simplify systems at the domain level.
• Mentor engineers across teams; contribute to hiring and partner with the Engineering Manager on team culture and psychological safety.
• Improve how the team measures, communicates, and delivers customer impact; challenge inefficiency and drive continuous improvement.

Competencies

• Probes to understand stated and unstated stakeholder needs; partners as a trusted domain advisor and shapes technical direction with Product and Architecture.
• Monitors team and own deliverables against performance, time, budget, and quality standards; escalates risks early and redirects low-impact work.
• Makes independent technical judgments in open-ended requirements; drives the greatest customer impact through business-aware decisions.
• Identifies when self or team results are not moving the needle; works with the Engineering Manager to improve how impact is measured and communicated.
• Defines solutions and practices that level up the team; stewards code quality, operational excellence, and pragmatic improvement across the domain.
• Takes initiative to grow technical and leadership skills; shares learnings openly and leads by example under ambiguity.
• Promotes productive conflict, disagree-and-commit, and constructive dialogue across teams and stakeholders.
• Adapts effectively across cultures and unfamiliar situations; demonstrates urgency and composure on critical deliverables.
• Unblocks others and eliminates toil through pragmatic technical insight, system simplification, and durable fixes.
• Leads problem decomposition and decision-making with incomplete information; balances trade-offs across simplicity, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Demonstrates excellent verbal, written, interpersonal, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Uses AI tools (cursor/ claude/ pi) and agentic coding assistants effectively; guides adoption of practical patterns across the team and domain.

Technical skills

An ideal candidate should have knowledge of and hands-on experience with the following technologies:

Required

• Microsoft technologies: C# (.NET Core, .NET Framework), TypeScript, NestJS, and Node.js
• Microservices and event-driven architecture using Apache Kafka or other event processing services
• Modern UI frameworks: React.js or Angular
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred): EC2, S3, Lambda, EFS, ECS, EKS, API Gateway, SQS, IAM, VPC
• Relational databases (MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, DocumentDB)
• Docker and Kubernetes
• CI/CD tools: Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, YAML, PowerShell
• Observability tools: Splunk, ELK Stack, DataDog
• Testing strategies: Unit Testing, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• RESTful APIs; OpenAPI/Swagger, API design, and API versioning
• Git-based source-code management, branching strategies, and code review leadership
• Jira and Agile/Scrum practices

Nice to have

• Knowledge of Python
• Knowledge of data analytics tools such as Databricks
• AWS or Azure Developer certification

Educational qualifications

Graduate or postgraduate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline.

Experience

Minimum of 5–8 years of hands-on software development experience, including technical leadership on production systems and sustained ownership of domain or multi-component initiatives.