Position Overview:
Luminate Bank is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to design, build, secure, and run the proprietary applications and integrations that connect our banking and mortgage platforms. You'll ship priority business software hands-on-using AI coding agents such as Claude Code to accelerate delivery-while setting the team's standards for secure delivery, reliable operations, and responsible use of AI tools in a regulated environment where most of our applications handle nonpublic personal information (NPI).
This is an individual contributor role. You'll provide technical direction and coaching to a small team of engineers and specialists; people management stays with the EVP, Technology or a designated manager. Most of your time will be hands-on engineering, with protected time for design, mentoring, documentation, and cross-training. Early priorities include moving from Azure DevOps to GitHub, improving the reliability of key integrations, and building applications that fill gaps in our vendor platforms.
Responsibilities and Duties:
Application & Integration Engineering
- Design and build production applications, services, and extensions for priority banking and mortgage needs, working with business owners to define scope and acceptance criteria.
- Build and support integrations using REST APIs, webhooks, events, and scheduled batch exchanges. Evaluate vendor capabilities and find maintainable ways to close gaps between third-party software and how Luminate operates.
- Make integrations safe under failure with authentication, input validation, idempotency, bounded retries, rate limiting, and safe replay, and use reconciliation to confirm business outcomes.
- Own architecture and technical quality for assigned services, including API contracts, automated tests, and support documentation.
AI-Assisted Development
- Use the bank's approved AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code) to speed up implementation, testing, and documentation, while owning what ships: review generated code and verify its behavior with meaningful tests.
- Create reusable agent skills, instructions, and patterns for the team, with approved model services, scoped tool permissions, and clear rules for sensitive data and production access.
- For prioritized business use cases that use AI agents, define permitted actions, evaluation criteria, human approval points, monitoring, and recovery before anything goes live.
Software Factory & DevOps
- Shape and maintain GitHub-based development and release practices, including the migration from Azure DevOps, in partnership with internal teams and implementation partners.
- Build reusable repository templates and CI/CD workflows with automated tests, code and dependency scanning, secret detection, required reviews, and controlled promotion between environments.
- Provision and maintain application infrastructure as code, using the bank's approved hosting, identity, networking, and secrets services.
- Keep engineering documentation alongside the code. Automate API and release documentation where practical, with named owners reviewing operational procedures.
Security, Governance & Production Reliability
- Implement and verify controls that protect NPI and other sensitive data, including least privilege, secrets management, encryption, access controls, and redacted telemetry.
- Work with Information Security, Compliance, and Risk on threat modeling, AI service approvals, vendor reviews, vulnerability remediation, and audit evidence. Escalate residual risks to the bank's authorized decision makers.
- Instrument assigned services with logs, metrics, health checks, and alerts, and maintain backup and recovery procedures. Test alerts and recovery with named responders and backup owners.
- Take part in incident response and critical releases under a defined support and escalation model, and use operational data to improve reliability.
Technical Leadership & Collaboration
- Mentor engineers and specialists through pairing, design and code reviews, and knowledge sharing. Cross-train the team so every service can be supported by more than its original author.
- Help with recruiting, technical interviews, and onboarding, and give technical feedback that supports team members' development plans alongside their people manager.
- Work with the EVP, Technology and delivery stakeholders to sequence priorities, flag capacity constraints, and balance product work, reliability, security remediation, and technical debt.
- Partner with Data & Analytics, Business Solutions & Delivery, and IT & Infrastructure. Define integration contracts and shared delivery patterns with Data & Analytics, which owns the lakehouse and data quality.
Qualifications and Skills:
Required Experience
- Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of designing, delivering, and supporting production applications.
- Technical leadership through architecture, mentoring, code review, and cross-functional delivery. Formal people management experience is not required.
- Hands-on experience developing applications with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code), with the judgment to review generated code, test its behavior, protect sensitive information, and recognize the tools' limits.
- Experience shipping through a reviewed delivery pipeline in GitHub, Azure DevOps, GitLab, or similar, and the ability to build GitHub-based CI/CD and infrastructure automation.
- Experience deploying and operating services that handle sensitive data, with sound practices in application security, identity, secrets management, and incident response.
- Hands-on experience building API and webhook integrations, including authentication, error handling, data consistency, and production troubleshooting.
- Experience solutioning gaps between third-party vendor platforms and internal business processes.
Core Competencies
- Modern Development: Strong programming skills in a language such as Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, or C#, plus relational databases, SQL, and API design.
- Security Mindset: Familiarity with OWASP Top 10, secure SDLC, identity and access management, and the protection of NPI.
- Systems Thinking: Ability to understand data flows and dependencies across multiple platforms and design solutions that scale and remain supportable.
- Communication: Ability to explain technical tradeoffs, delivery risks, and operational needs clearly to business stakeholders and executive leadership.
Preferred Experience (Strong Plus)
- System configuration and development experience in banking or mortgage technology, such as Encompass, Vesta, or Jack Henry, and related point-of-sale, pricing, or document systems.
- Building or governing production AI agents, including agent skills and instructions, evaluation frameworks, MCP integrations, and runtime controls.
- Setting up engineering practices for a small team, improving developer workflows, or leading a migration to GitHub.
Education:
- Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related software development field required; bachelor's degree preferred.
- Cloud, security, or DevOps certifications (e.g., Microsoft Azure, AWS, CompTIA Security+, GitHub) are a plus.
Benefits:
- Competitive compensation reliant on ability and experience
- Excellent benefits package including health, pretax HSA, FSA accounts and dental & vision
- Life and AD&D Insurance, as well as additional voluntary benefit possibilities
- 401K with robust company match
- Flexible PTO program
- Earned Sick & Safe Time (ESST)
- The opportunity to work for the Midwest's fastest growing lender
