Staff Engineer

About the role

As a Staff Engineer on Thrivent's Enterprise Payments and Money Movement team, you will design, build, and evolve the core services that power Thrivent's enterprise-wide payment processing capabilities. You will convert business and customer needs into scalable, reliable technical solutions that securely and efficiently move money across Thrivent's systems. Drawing on your deep engineering expertise, you will build distributed services using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and RESTful APIs, while integrating with Thrivent's mainframe systems through SOAP-based interfaces. You will lead the resolution of complex technical and operational challenges in payment orchestration, resiliency, and data integrity. You will ensure solutions align with long-term platform strategy, reliability goals, and enterprise architecture standards. In this role, you will also play a critical part in developing engineering talent by mentoring team members, driving technical excellence, and advancing skills in modern engineering practices including Agile delivery, DevOps automation, and site reliability principles. Our platform is central to Thrivent's payments ecosystem, and this role provides the opportunity to influence its technical direction and elevate the capabilities of the engineering organization. DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES: Designing Solutions Apply expert industry knowledge and broad understanding of multiple disciplines with technical knowledge to drive outcomes for customers Ability to work and problem solve independently on initiatives that align to the broader software engineering strategy Design systems and software integration patterns across a diverse software engineering ecosystem. These patterns should align to high level engineering goals and business initiatives Developing Software Use independent, critical thinking to solve complex problems which are significant to the customer. Uses application and system data, as well as past experiences to inform decision making. Leader in technical expertise; Develops most architecturally impactful components of solutions Lead to identify, incorporate and define development frameworks and libraries useful to the product Learning and Applying New Techniques Seek out industry and technology knowledge along with best practices to share with the team. Collaborating within the Team Coordinate design and integration of the entire system including subsystems. Research and recommend technology to improve the current systems Participate in team's collaboration session to provide technical expertise to solve a problem/remove technical roadblocks for the team Participate in product planning and implementation. Helps product owner to create technical user stories as required/needed. Contribute to detailed application specifications, standards, and diagrams and develop coding standards / best practices Collaborating Across Teams Broker solution design and implementation across product teams to achieve outcomes; Contribute to overall systems design which involves multiple teams, research and provide customization or development recommendations, and implement accordingly Collaborating Across The Organization Act as an SME to provide over all operations and support processes to build resilient systems for the enterprise Setting product/platform technology strategy Lead the design of critical path/technology for the product group. Contribute to innovative solutions that align to strategic objectives for the customer Provide platform technology expertise to teams within product group as well as interdependent teams across the organization Help to define the technology / tools roadmap along with the product owner for the team. Defining Engineering Standards and Patterns Partner with the engineering community inside and outside Thrivent in establishing best practices Share engineering standards across internal teams and collaborate to help software engineers apply these patterns to build solutions that achieve outcomes DevOps Lead the resolution of critical incidents and provides leadership in proactively addressing product issues Continuously assessing technology to build more stable, scalable, and resilient software Promote and expand on the use of the CI/CD pipeline to improve the deployment and build process. Selecting & Managing Technology Vendors Lead the evaluation process for software solutions - advising on strengths and weaknesses of the external software. Provide a summary of how a tool impacts business processes and goals. Contribute in criteria's for selecting the right platforms and software for the product team. Coaching Engineers Provide guidance and reinforcement around established engineering best practices Provide technical leadership and mentoring to other engineers of varying levels inside the product group Provide trainings and demos to address knowledge gaps with in the team Recruiting and Building Talent Engage in the tech community to build the Thrivent techn