Specialist Software Engineer – Backend Services (C#, .NET)

Job Description

.NET Specialist Software Engineering | Transamerica

The Tone:
This is a full-time hybrid role at Transamerica, with required in-office days in Philadelphia, PA, Cedar Rapids, IA, or Denver, CO. Transamerica is a financial services company offering insurance, retirement, and investment solutions to help individuals achieve financial freedom and plan for the best life possible. This role is critical for setting the technical direction and ensuring the stability, reliability, and recoverability of business-critical backend services built on C# and the .NET Framework, directly impacting engineering quality across multiple teams.

The TL;DR
• Role: Full Time
• Type: Full-time
• Location: Hybrid – Philadelphia, PA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Denver, CO
• Pay: $141000–$165000 yearly
• Mission: To set the technical direction for the design, development, and operational hardening of business-critical backend services built on C# and the .NET Framework.
• Tech Stack: C#, .NET Framework 4.8, SQL Server, LLBLGen, Visual Studio, Git/Bitbucket, SQL Server Management Studio, NUnit, Windows Event Log, Service Control Manager, InstallUtil/ProjectInstaller

What You’ll Actually Do
• Technical Leadership: 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.
• Concurrency Expertise: Serve as the organization’s subject-matter expert for multi-threaded application design, establishing patterns and resolving complex issues involving synchronization and thread lifecycle management.
• Production Incident Resolution: Lead diagnosis and permanent resolution of high-impact production issues, defining systemic improvements to prevent recurrence rather than relying on mitigation by restart.
• Service Reliability Design: Design and establish self-managing service patterns, including startup validation, master-orchestration/worker-thread models, heartbeat monitoring, and dead-thread recovery.
• Data Integrity & Performance: Define transaction-integrity models for data, provide technical authority for SQL Server design and performance, and establish data-access architecture and engineering standards using ORM frameworks.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, math, engineering, or another technical field, or equivalent experience in a specialist software engineering capacity.
• Experience: Six years of professional software engineering experience with substantial depth in C# and the .NET Framework (4.x), including deep, hands-on multithreading and concurrency expertise, production experience building and operating Windows Services, and a proven track record diagnosing and permanently resolving intermittent production failures. Five years of experience with SQL Server at an advanced engineering level, covering transactions, isolation levels, concurrency, deadlock prevention/retry/resolution, execution-plan analysis, and indexing, along with experience establishing data-access standards with LLBLGen or comparable ORM frameworks.
• Skills: Expertise in multi-threaded application design and concurrency primitives, advanced SQL Server performance tuning and relational design, production-grade Windows Service development and operational practices, and strong design discipline including service-oriented architecture, dependency injection, and object-oriented principles.
• Bonus: Master’s degree, knowledge of the financial services or insurance industry, experience operating under formal change management and L3 production support models, familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., AppDynamics, Splunk), exposure to messaging and integration technologies (e.g., MQ, Kafka), and exposure to cloud services (AWS/Azure) or containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).