Manager, Applications Development - Solutions Architecture

American Equity Investment Life Insurance Company is a leading provider of annuity solutions designed to help clients protect and grow retirement income. Part of Brookfield Wealth Solutions, we partner with more than 40,000 financial professionals and help fund over half a million retirements nationwide. Recognized by Newsweek as one of America’s Most Trustworthy Companies and named a Top Workplace in Iowa, American Equity fosters a collaborative and purpose-driven culture where employees are empowered to ignite their passion and help shape the future of financial services.

Headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, with satellite offices in Charlotte, NC and New York, NY, American Equity provides opportunities for employees to support work across the enterprise, including our sister company, American National, headquartered in Houston, Texas.

 

GENERAL PURPOSE OF THE JOB:    

The Manager, Applications Development leads a high‑performing team responsible for delivering and supporting American Equity’s enterprise API platform. This role provides strategic and technical leadership for API platform capabilities across multiple business domains, ensuring alignment with enterprise architectural direction and technology roadmaps. The manager partners closely with Product Owners, business stakeholders, and all IT functions to design, configure, and implement solutions that meet business outcomes while adhering to schedule, budget, and scope expectations. The role also drives API standards, promotes best practices, and fosters adoption of modern integration patterns across the organization. This role has end-to-end accountability for the stability, scalability, and evolution of the AE Connect platform, including API lifecycle governance, service performance, integration standards, and alignment to enterprise data architecture and event-driven patterns. 

**Position sits in Des Moines and will work an onsite schedule**

 

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:   

• Leads teams comprised of business analysts and software developers (employees and consultants) to deliver technology solutions supporting American Equity’s enterprise initiatives. 

• Leads implementation efforts across multiple business domains (New Business, Contract Administration, Agency) within the enterprise API platform, ensuring work items are delivered on time and in accordance with enterprise technical standards, security guidelines, and architectural patterns. 

• Owns and executes the technical roadmap for assigned software development team(s), collaborating effectively with direct reports, IS managers, IT leadership, business units, and external partners to ensure alignment with enterprise strategy. 

• Ensures engineering excellence through standardized development practices, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud‑oriented delivery patterns.  

• Establishes and enforces API lifecycle governance including versioning strategy, backward compatibility, documentation standards, and security controls. 

• Drives adoption of domain-driven design and event-based integration patterns to support scalable and decoupled service architecture. 

• Ensures production readiness through observability standards, incident response processes, performance monitoring, and service-level objectives. 

• Partners with Enterprise Architecture to evolve AE Connect in alignment with long-term modernization and policy administration strategy. 

• Ensures proper utilization of team members and achieves balanced allocation of work based on business priorities and team capacity.  

• Establishes and monitors metrics related to performance oversight, quality, and process improvement, driving continuous improvement across the team. 

• Leads a diverse team of employees with responsibility for managing the employee life cycle and experience, including but not limited to, selection and retention of talent, continuous feedback and performance management, reward and recognition, corrective action and employee development;  

• Collaborates with IT Operations to maintain the production technical environments to ensure system quality and availability and performance expectations for customers. 

• Partners with IT leaders to help implement employee engagement strategies; collaborates with other IS managers and IT leadership to identify learning initiatives and implement training programs based on the initiatives.   

• Communicates and coordinates process, procedure and expectation additions/changes to employees that align with corporate strategy. 

• Performs other related work as assigned. 

 

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES: 

Direct Reports: Team of approximately eight (8) to twelve (12) Application Developers and business Analysts (mix of employees and consultants). 

 

EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE:   

• Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) in CS, MIS, information technology, or related field of study; plus six (6) years of progressively responsible related technical experience; or equivalent combination of education and/or experience. 
• Experience in implementing and supporting enterprise API platforms required.  
• Experience working with, and managing, teams that include offshore members. 
• Prior supervisory experience preferred. 
• Prior experience in an Agile environment preferred. 

 

CERTIFICATES, LICENSES, PROFESSIONAL DESIGNATIONS: None required for this position. 

 

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES:    

• Deep expertise within the .NET programming language 

• Knowledge of cloud technology and supporting architecture principles, preferably within AWS 

• Knowledge of REST-based API principles and tools to use them. 

• Knowledge of relational and non-relational data structures 

• Experience overseeing software development projects, including knowledge of emerging technical innovations and best practices. 

• Broad knowledge of information technology functions and disciplines, including but not limited to, architecture, data management, operations, security and business analysis. 

• Ability to lead software development efforts in a dynamically changing environment. 

• Knowledge of vendor management. 

• Ability to mentor and build strong teams. 

• Strong customer service orientation. 

• Strong stakeholder management skills. 

• Effective verbal and written communication skills. 

• Ability to work cooperatively and successfully with employees, customers, and other outside third parties. 

• Strong organizational and planning skills. 

• Strong problem solving, risk assessment, and risk management skills. 

• Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions.  

• Ability to read, analyze, and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals and technical/operational procedures. 

• Ability to define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions. 
• Ability to successfully handle pressure and meet deadlines in a fast-paced work environment. 

 

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This description covers the major purpose and essential functions of the job.  It is not intended to give all details or a step-by-step account of the way each task is to be performed.  Employees may receive other job related instructions and be required to perform other job related work requested by their manager.  All requirements are subject to possible modification to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities.