JobsAmerican Family Insurance

Senior Engineer, Internal Developer Platform

American Family Insurance · Madison, WI

Posted Jul 14, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

Behavioral

Walk me through a time you built or improved an internal developer portal, maybe with Backstage. What problem were you solving and how did developers actually use it afterward?

whether they have hands-on Backstage experience tied to a real developer-experience outcome, not just familiarity with the tool

Tell me about a time a service you supported started missing its SLO. How did you find the cause and what did you change afterward?

practical SRE instincts and whether error budgets and SLOs are lived practice or just vocabulary

This role sits between infrastructure work and treating developers as your customers. Tell me about a time those two pulled in different directions and how you resolved it.

whether they can hold platform-as-a-product mentality when reliability and developer convenience conflict

Technical

Say you need to add a custom plugin to Backstage that pulls service ownership data from your software catalog and surfaces it on each service's page. How would you approach building that?

depth of TypeScript, Node.js, and React skill applied specifically to Backstage's plugin architecture

How would you design a Backstage software template that scaffolds a new service, wires it into CI/CD, and registers it in the catalog automatically?

ability to translate platform-as-a-product thinking into a concrete self-service workflow

You're running workloads across both EKS and GKE. What are the real differences you've hit in practice around IAM, networking, or cluster upgrades between the two?

genuine dual-cloud experience versus surface-level familiarity with one provider and buzzword knowledge of the other

Explain how you'd use Crossplane to let application teams provision a database or queue without giving them direct cloud console access.

understanding of Kubernetes-native infrastructure abstraction and composite resource design, not just that they've heard of Crossplane

Tell me about a Terraform module setup you built that other teams reused. How did you version it and manage promotion across environments?

whether they've actually operated shared IaC at scale versus writing one-off Terraform for their own project

Walk me through a GitLab CI/CD pipeline you built that integrated with JFrog Artifactory. What broke, and how did you fix it?

real pipeline-building and artifact-management experience, and comfort troubleshooting under pressure

Describe a Datadog dashboard or monitor setup you built that actually caught a problem before users noticed.

hands-on observability skill and a proactive mindset toward platform reliability

How do you think about secrets management and supply-chain security, like image signing or SBOMs, in a platform you're responsible for?

whether DevSecOps is built into their default workflow or something they'd bolt on only if asked

Situational

A developer says the platform's new deployment pipeline is too slow and is going around it with a manual workaround. What do you do?

how they balance guardrails and standardization against actual developer adoption and trust

Imagine you're rolling out a Kubernetes cluster version upgrade across dozens of teams' workloads. How do you plan it so nothing breaks in production?

operational rigor around cluster lifecycle management and change management at scale

You're paged at 2 a.m. because a shared platform service is down and it's affecting multiple teams' deployments. Walk me through what you do first.

incident response discipline and ability to triage a platform-wide outage calmly and methodically

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The full job description

As published by American Family Insurance.

This role is responsible for designing, building, and operating cloud platform and DevOps capabilities across AWS and GCP. The engineer will enable reliable, secure, and scalable delivery by developing Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code foundations, building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, and driving automation, observability, and operational best practices across engineering teams. Position Compensation Range: $99,000.00 - $167,000.00 Pay Rate Type: Salary Compensation may vary based on the job level and your geographic work location. Relocation support is offered for eligible candidates. This role has been not approved for sponsorship now or in the future.  This also includes current Candidates that have an approved F1 / OPT/ STEM qualification.  Core Qualifications & Responsibilities: Developer Experience (DevX) & Backstage Development: • Proven experience in designing, implementing, and managing an internal developer portal, preferably with Backstage.io. • A strong desire to improve the developer experience by creating self-service tools and streamlining workflows.  • Expertise in developing custom Backstage plugins and customizing the platform using TypeScript, Node.js, and React to meet the unique needs of our developers. • Experience configuring and managing the Backstage Software Catalog to provide a unified view of services, documentation, and tooling. • Ability to create and maintain software templates using Backstage's Scaffolder to standardize project creation and enforce best practices. Cloud and Infrastructure Management: • Extensive experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP) and familiarity with the other. This includes expertise in core services like VPC, IAM, S3, and managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE).  • Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles and hands-on experience with tools like Terraform to automate the provisioning and management of cloud resources. • Experience with Crossplane.io to manage cloud services and infrastructure through a unified, Kubernetes-native API. This includes creating and managing composite resources to abstract away the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. • Strong understanding of containerization technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes, and their ecosystems. CI/CD & DevOps Mindset: • Solid experience with CI/CD principles and proficiency in building and maintaining pipelines using GitLab CI/CD. • Experience integrating various tools into CI/CD pipelines to automate builds, testing, and deployments. • Proficiency in managing software artifacts and dependencies using JFrog Artifactory. This includes creating and managing repositories and integrating Artifactory with our CI/CD pipelines.  • A strong scripting and automation skill set using languages like Python, Go, or Bash. Observability & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): • A solid understanding of SRE principles, including Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and a focus on reliability, scalability, and performance. • Hands-on experience with Datadog for full-stack observability, including setting up monitors, creating dashboards, and using APM for distributed tracing. • A proactive approach to identifying and resolving platform issues before they impact developers. • Experience in troubleshooting complex, distributed systems and a methodical approach to problem-solving. Software Development Fundamentals: • Strong programming skills in languages such as Python, TypeScript, and JavaScript. • Experience with web development fundamentals and API design (REST, GraphQL). • A solid understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) best practices, including version control with Git. • Demonstrated knowledge of modern SDLC practices and operating models (e.g., Agile, product-based teams, platform-as-a-product). • Demonstrated experience delivering and operating cloud platforms in both AWS and GCP , including core services for compute, storage, networking, IAM, and managed Kubernetes. • Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating Kubernetes platforms and tooling (e.g., cluster lifecycle, upgrades, workload onboarding patterns, ingress, service discovery, secrets/config management). • Demonstrated experience with Infrastructure as Code and reusable module patterns across cloud providers (e.g., Terraform; CloudFormation as needed), including pipeline integration, versioning, and promotion strategies. • Demonstrated experience with CI/CD tooling and practices (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket pipelines), including build/test/release automation, artifact management, and environment deployment strategies. • Demonstrated experience with GitOps and deployment automation patterns (e.g., Argo CD/Flux where applicable) for Kubernetes and cloud workloads. • Demonstrated experience with observability and operational practices (monitoring/alerting, centralized logging, tracing, dashboards, on-call readiness, incident response, runbooks). • Demonstrated experience applying SRE/operational metrics and reliability practices (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity/performance considerations). • Demonstrated systems and network fundamentals for cloud environments (VPC/VNet design, DNS, routing, load balancing, proxies/firewalls, certificate/TLS basics). • Demonstrated programming/scripting capability in one or more of: Python, Go, Java, Shell/Bash; strong Linux fundamentals. • Demonstrated experience integrating services and tools through APIs and secure communication patterns across applications, databases, and platforms. • Demonstrated knowledge of DevSecOps practices (secrets management, vulnerability scanning, least privilege, supply-chain controls such as signing/SBOM where applicable, and automated policy enforcement). Licenses Licenses • Not applicable. Travel Requirements • Up to 10%. Physical Requirements • Work primarily involves sitting/standing. Working Conditions • Not applicable. Additional Information • To ensure a strong start, all employees participate in our New Employee Orientation during their first week.  This experience is held in person at our Madison, WI Headquarters or one of our AmFam core locations to help you connect with our mission, meet key team members and build relationships that support your growth.  At times, sessions may be delivered virtually based on scheduling and availability.  • Offer to selected candidate will be made contingent on the results of applicable background checks • Offer to selected candidate is contingent on signing a non-disclosure agreement for proprietary information, trade secrets, and inventions • Sponsorship will not be considered for this position unless specified in the posting In this flex office/home role, you will be expected to work a minimum of 10 days per month from one of the following office locations: Madison, WI 53783; Boston, MA 02110, Denver, Co Candidates must reside within a 50-mile radius of the office location (or 35-mile radius for Boston). #LI-Hybrid We provide benefits that support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing. You will have access to comprehensive medical, dental, vision and wellbeing benefits that enable you to take care of your health. We also offer a competitive 401(k) contribution, a pension plan, an annual incentive, 9 paid holidays and a paid time off program (23 days accrued annually for full-time employees). In addition, our student loan repayment program and paid-family leave are available to support our employees and their families. Interns and contingent workers are not eligible for American Family Insurance Group benefits. We are an equal opportunity employer. It is our policy to comply with all applicable federal, state and local laws pertaining to non-discrimination, non-harassment and equal opportunity. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. American Family Insurance is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please email AskHR@AmFam.com to request a reasonable accommodation. #LI-BC2

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