. NET Specialist Software Engineering

Job Family

IT - Development

Job Description Summary

The Specialist Software Engineer sets the technical direction for the design, development, and operational hardening of business-critical backend services built on C# and the .NET Framework. This role is the organization's authority on multi-threaded Windows Service design, service stability and recovery, and the diagnosis of complex production issues. The Specialist takes ownership of inherited, high-risk services and brings them to enterprise standards for reliability, observability, recoverability, and auditability — establishing the patterns, standards, and reference designs that raise engineering quality across teams.

Job Description

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and lead the architecture, design, development, deployment, and operational support of business-critical Windows Services using C# and .NET Framework 4.8. 
• Serve as the organization's subject-matter expert for multi-threaded application design, establishing patterns and resolving the most complex issues involving Monitor, volatile, Interlocked, ManualResetEvent, synchronization, and thread lifecycle management. 
• Lead diagnosis and resolution of high-impact production issues involving concurrency, service stability, performance, memory usage, and resource contention; define systemic improvements that prevent recurrence. Drive issues to documented root cause rather than mitigation by restart. 
• Design and establish self-managing service patterns: startup pre-flight validation before a service reports healthy, master-orchestration and worker-thread models, heartbeat monitoring and dead-thread recovery, failure thresholds with controlled escalation, and documented, visible blocked states in place of silent hangs. 
• Define the transaction-integrity model for data entering our systems — received, persisted, then processed — with dead-letter handling and recoverable, replayable processing so that in-flight work is never lost. 
• Provide technical authority for SQL Server design and performance, including execution-plan analysis, indexing strategies, isolation levels, concurrency, and deadlock prevention, detection, retry, and resolution. Establish connection-resiliency and bounded-memory data-access standards. 
• Establish data-access architecture and engineering standards using LLBLGen or comparable object-relational mapping frameworks. 
• Define deployment, configuration, monitoring, and operational practices for Windows Services using Windows Event Log, Service Control Manager, InstallUtil/ProjectInstaller, and related tooling. Design application-owned observability — queryable health, backlog and queue-depth visibility, and end-to-end traceability for L3 support. 
• Create and govern technical standards, reusable patterns, reference designs, runbooks, and documentation for complex application and service changes across multiple teams or initiatives. 
• Influence product, architecture, engineering, and support stakeholders to align technology decisions with reliability, scalability, maintainability, security, cost, and business outcomes. 
• Lead design and code reviews for the highest-risk work, raise engineering quality across teams, and mentor senior developers and other technical professionals. 
• Evaluate and resolve ambiguous, cross-functional technical challenges with significant operational or business impact, making authoritative recommendations to technology leadership. 
• Anticipate technology risks and modernization needs, define multi-year improvement strategies, and lead adoption of new tools and frameworks with minimal oversight. 

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, math, engineering, or other technical field, or equivalent experience. 
• Six years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial, demonstrable depth in C# and the .NET Framework (4.x). This role is primarily legacy service engineering, not greenfield. 
• Deep, hands-on multithreading and concurrency expertise: thread lifecycle management, synchronization primitives (Monitor, lock, volatile, Interlocked, ManualResetEvent/AutoResetEvent), and the diagnosis of deadlocks, race conditions, and resource contention. 
• Production experience building and operating Windows Services (ServiceBase, Service Control Manager, InstallUtil/ProjectInstaller, OnStart/OnStop lifecycle correctness, Windows Event Log). 
• Proven track record diagnosing and permanently resolving intermittent production failures — service hangs, memory exhaustion, and stability issues — with clear root-cause analysis. 
• Five years of experience with SQL Server at an advanced engineering level: transactions, isolation levels, concurrency, deadlock prevention/retry/resolution, execution-plan analysis, indexing, and connection resiliency. Strong understanding of relational design techniques and philosophies (RDBMS, normalization, star/Kimball for reporting). 
• Experience establishing data-access standards with LLBLGen or a comparable ORM (Entity Framework or similar). 
• Expertise with core engineering tooling: Visual Studio, Git/Bitbucket, SQL Server Management Studio, NUnit (or comparable), and build/deployment pipelines. 
• Strong design discipline: service-oriented architecture, dependency injection, OOD/OOP, and clean separation of concerns. 
• Ability to operate independently from a problem statement with minimal direction, make and document sound engineering decisions, verify work against requirements, and leave code and documentation more maintainable than found. 
• Attention to detail and results orientation with a strong customer and operational-reliability focus. 
• Analytical and problem-solving skills, and the ability to present technical information to all levels of the organization. 
• Ability to prioritize workload to meet tight deadlines, both as part of a team and independently. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree. 
• Knowledge of the financial services or insurance industry (ACORD, commissions, or regulated audit requirements). 
• Experience operating under formal change management and L3 production support models. 
• Experience with observability tooling (AppDynamics, Splunk, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch) and a clear understanding of why application-owned instrumentation remains necessary. 
• Exposure to messaging and integration technologies (MQ, Kafka, API gateways, FTP/SFTP/NDM) and delivery-guarantee/dead-letter patterns. 
• Exposure to cloud services (AWS/Azure), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines). 
• Technology or platform certifications (e.g., Microsoft, AWS). 
• Familiarity with REST/API development (ASP.NET Web API) and modern frontend frameworks is a plus but not central to this role. 

Working Conditions

• Hybrid-Office Environment (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays)
• Work outside of normal business hours may be required
• Moderate Travel 10 to 25%

This job description is not a contract of employment nor for any specific job responsibilities. The Company may change, add to, remove, or revoke the terms of this job description at its discretion. Managers may assign other duties and responsibilities as needed. In the event an employee or applicant requests or requires an accommodation to perform job functions, the applicable HR Business Partner should be contacted to evaluate the accommodation request.

Compensation

 

The Salary for this position generally ranges between $141,00 - $165,000 annually. Please note that the salary range is a good faith estimate for this position and actual starting pay is determined by several factors including qualifications, experience, geography, work location designation (in-office, hybrid, remote) and operational needs. Salary may vary above and below the stated amounts, as permitted by applicable law.

 

Additionally, this position is typically eligible for an Annual Bonus based on the Company Bonus Plan/Individual Performance and is at the Company’s discretion. 

 

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

  

This is a hybrid position requiring three days in office per week in one of our hub locations (Philadelphia, PA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Denver, CO).  Relocation assistance will not be provided for this position.

 

Enterprise Technology is a global Aegon/Transamerica organization that enables the business to move quickly and deliver the best possible outcomes for clients, while keeping their information safe and secure.

 

With more than 1,000 employees across the UK, US, Netherlands, Hungary, Spain, and Hong Kong, Enterprise Technology is a diverse, global team. Our experts work across areas such as application development, information security, infrastructure, data & analytics, risk & controls, program management, and architecture. We offer a wide range of career opportunities and are committed to supporting employee development.

 

Curiosity is the quality we value most. Much of our work involves solving complex problems, applying knowledge in new ways, and continuously improving how we operate. As technology evolves rapidly, we look for inquisitive people who are confident challenging the status quo and helping us drive change.

What We Offer  

For eligible employees, we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support both the personal and financial well-being of our employees. 

Compensation Benefits 

• Competitive Pay 

• Bonus for Eligible Employees 

Benefits Package 

• Pension Plan 

• 401k Match

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Tuition Reimbursement

• Disability Insurance

• Medical Insurance

• Dental Insurance

• Vision Insurance

• Employee Discounts

• Career Training & Development Opportunities

Health and Work/Life Balance Benefits 

• Paid Time Off starting at 160 hours annually for employees in their first year of service.

• Ten (10) paid holidays per year (typically mirroring the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) holidays).

• Be Well Company holistic wellness program, which includes Wellness Coaching and Reward Dollars 

• Parental Leave – fifteen (15) days of paid parental leave per calendar year to eligible employees with at least one year of service at the time of birth, placement of an adopted child, or placement of a foster care child.

• Adoption Assistance

• Employee Assistance Program

• Back-Up Care Program

• PTO for Volunteer Hours

• Employee Matching Gifts Program

• Employee Resource Groups

• Inclusion and Diversity Programs

• Employee Recognition Program

• Referral Bonus Programs

Inclusion & Diversity  

  

We believe our commitment to diversity and inclusion creates a work environment filled with exceptional individuals. We’re thrilled to have been recognized for our efforts through the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, Dave Thomas Adoption Friendly Advocate, and several Seramount lists, including the Inclusion Index, 100 Best Companies for Working Parents, Best Companies for Dads, and Top 75 Companies for Executive Women. 

  

To foster a culture of inclusivity throughout our workforce, workplace, and marketplace, Transamerica offers a wide range of diversity and inclusion programs. This includes our company-sponsored, employee-driven Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which are formed around a shared interest or a common characteristic of diversity. ERGs are open to all employees. They provide a supportive environment to help us better appreciate our similarities and differences and understand how they benefit us all. 

   

Giving Back  

  

We believe our responsibilities extend beyond our corporate walls. That's why we created the Aegon Transamerica Foundation in 1994. Through a mix of financial grants and the volunteer efforts of our employees, the foundation supports nonprofit organizations focused on the things that matter most to our people in the communities where we live and work.     

  

Transamerica’s Parent Company  

Aegon acquired the Transamerica business in 1999. Since its start in 1844, Aegon has  grown into an international company serving more than 23.9 million people across the globe.* It offers investment, protection, and retirement solutions, always with a clear purpose: Helping people live their best lives. As a leading global investor and employer, the company seeks to have a positive impact by addressing critical environmental and societal issues, with a focus on climate change and inclusion and diversity.   

* As of December 31, 2023