Senior Software Engineer

About this role

This position will be based at our New York Campus and require a hybrid work environment: 2 days weekly onsite and 3 days weekly remote.

Who we are

Variable is the applied innovation team within Northwestern Mutual. Our mission is to experiment with emerging technologies and technical strategies to meaningfully influence our organization’s technology roadmaps and investments. We partner with teams from across the entire organization to bring emerging technology to forefront.

We are committed to fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment that nurtures innovation. Our team provides a stable yet dynamic platform for personal and professional growth, allowing individuals to drive meaningful change throughout our organization.

About the Role

We are hiring a senior engineer to lead technical strategy work and to build the proofs of concept that give that strategy its evidence. The role sits between engineering, architecture, and the business. In a typical quarter you will shape the architecture for a new class of system, get architects, risk partners, and product owners aligned on a path none of them owns alone, write the recommendation that goes to senior leadership, and build enough of the system to show that the recommendation holds.

The work today centers on AI systems in regulated environments: agentic workflows and automations; the API, authorization, and fraud controls that make them safe; evaluation of systems whose outputs are non-deterministic; and the governance that lets them run in production. You will work with vendor platforms as often as with code we write ourselves, and much of the job is discovering what enterprise systems can actually do and what it would take to change them.

You have led, or owned a major workstream in, technical transformation programs inside a large, regulated organization. You know how enterprise systems, controls, and decision rights work, and you can still open an edito...