The posting
Company Description
Trupanion is a leading provider of medical insurance for cats and dogs in North America. Our mission is to help loving, responsible pet owners budget and care for their pets. At Trupanion, we offer a collaborative, casual, and pet-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to be themselves.
Job Description
US – Seattle only:
This position is open to candidates in the Seattle, WA area. You will have a hybrid remote/in-office schedule where you will work from our casual, pet-friendly office at least 3 days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday).
Trupanion is seeking a Software Architect who is responsible for designing and evolving scalable, secure, and maintainable technology solutions that power Trupanion's Insurance Platform capabilities. This role serves as a technical leader and trusted partner to engineering, product, and business stakeholders, ensuring technology solutions align with business objectives while delivering exceptional customer and operational outcomes.
This is a hands-on architecture role that balances strategic thinking with practical execution. The Software Architect partners closely with Software Development Managers, Principal Engineers, Product Managers, Infrastructure & Cloud, DevOps, development, and business teams to define technical direction, guide implementation, and solve complex business and technology challenges.
Success in this role requires deep technical expertise in modern cloud-native architectures, strong business acumen, the ability to transform existing platforms, and the ability to influence technical decisions while remaining closely connected to implementation, delivery outcomes, and business needs.
Key Outcomes & Impact
The Software Architect will:
- Define scalable architecture solutions that support Trupanion's Insurance Technology strategy and business goals.
- Improve system reliability, performance, maintainability, operations, and security across insurance platforms through influence and direct contribution.
- Accelerate delivery by providing clear architectural guidance, reusable patterns, and technical leadership.
- Leverage AI to both improve time-to-market and quality of software overall. Be an evangelist for effective and secure use of AI to improve business outcomes.
- Reduce technical debt through thoughtful modernization and architectural evolution.
- Ensure technology investments to maximize business value through a strong preference for buy vs. build, integrating, and extending proven solutions before building custom software.
- Enable engineering teams to move faster through pragmatic and actionable architecture decisions.
Core Responsibilities:
Solution & Platform Architecture
- Design architecture solutions that support policy administration, billing, claims processing, payments, customer servicing, underwriting, and partner integrations.
- Define system interactions, integration patterns, data flows, and service boundaries.
- Create and maintain architecture artifacts including solution designs, sequence diagrams, data models, and technical roadmaps.
- Ensure solutions align with established technology standards and architectural principles.
- Design highly available, scalable, and secure distributed systems using modern software architecture practices.
- Promote engineering best practices, including domain-driven design, RESTful API-first development, event-driven architectures, test-gated CI/CD pipelines, observability, and automated testing.
- Define standards for resiliency, performance, maintainability, and operational excellence.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure architecture decisions are successfully implemented.
- Define integration strategies using APIs, event-driven messaging, and modern integration patterns.
- Ensure systems exchange data efficiently, securely, and reliably.
- Partner with data platform teams to support enterprise reporting, analytics, and operational data needs.
Technology Evaluation & Innovation
- Evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and vendor solutions.
- Conduct proof-of-concept initiatives to validate architectural approaches.
- Make pragmatic build-versus-buy recommendations based on business value, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability.
- Stay current with trends in cloud computing, insurance technology, software architecture, and AI-assisted development.
- Drive efficiencies, from experience, on how to leverage AI technologies to improve time to market and quality of software releases.
Platform Modernization
- Assess existing systems and identify opportunities for simplification, modernization, and technical debt reduction.
- Develop pragmatic modernization strategies that minimize business disruption.
- Lead architectural efforts to decompose existing systems as appropriate and improve platform flexibility.
- Ensure modernization of work aligns with long-term business and technology goals.
Technical Leadership
- Provide technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle from concept through production deployment.
- Guide engineering teams through architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and implementation challenges.
- Participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions.
- Act as a technical advisor to engineering and product leadership.
Collaboration & Communication
- Collaborate effectively with Product Management, Engineering, Security, Data, Infrastructure & DevOps, and Business stakeholders.
- Communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Facilitate alignment across teams on architecture decisions and technical priorities.
- Build strong relationships through influence, credibility, and technical expertise.
- Equally comfortable presenting to and influencing the development community with exceptional technical expertise and the executive team with the ability to condense technical explanations in business-friendly terms.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience.
- 3+ years of solution architecture, software architecture, or principal-level engineering experience.
- Extensive experience designing and delivering distributed cloud applications using:
- C#
- .NET
- Azure
- REST APIs
- SQL Server
- Event-driven architectures
- Strong understanding of microservices, integration patterns, and modern software architecture principles.
- Experience designing highly available, secure, and scalable enterprise applications.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in Property & Casualty, Healthcare, Pet Insurance, Financial Services, or highly regulated industries.
- Experience with Azure Service Bus, Event Grid, Azure Functions, API Management, and modern integration platforms.
- Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
- Experience with CQRS and event sourcing patterns.
- Experience with SOLID design principles.
- Experience building and consuming SaaS platforms and third-party integrations.
- Knowledge of insurance operations, including claims, billing, underwriting, policy administration, or customer service.
- Experience with AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering productivity practices.
Additional Information
Compensation:
- The base salary range for this position is $170,000 - $190,000, on a full-time schedule.
- Along with base compensation, Trupanion employees are currently eligible for monthly bonuses.
- We want all employees to be invested in Trupanion’s success, so we grant Restricted Stock Units to all new team members. Our new hire grants vest over 4 years.
Benefits and Perks:
- Full medical, dental, and vision benefits at no cost to the employee
- Four weeks of paid time off and 9 paid float holidays (you can decide which days are most important to you!)
- Five-week sabbatical after five years of employment
- Open, casual, pet-friendly, and fun office environment
- Free medical health insurance for your pet (1 dog or cat)
- Paid time off to volunteer at nonprofit organizations
- Seattle Office Amenities: Free on-site gym, free dog walking services for office pets during business hours, free parking, and paid ORCA cards.
For more information about Trupanion, visit https://trupanion.com/about
Learn more about how Trupanion has revolutionized our industry and the reimbursement model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdWZ4KHiPTQ
Trupanion is an equal-opportunity employer and embraces diversity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, abilities, perspectives, and skills.
We will ensure that individuals are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodations.
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.
