Application Engineering Manager

Ready to lead engineers, shape architecture, and deliver applications that truly matter? Join Swiss Re as an Application Engineering Manager in São Paulo and make your mark on a global stage.

About the Role

At Swiss Re, technology is at the heart of how we make the world more resilient. As an Application Engineering Manager, you'll be at the forefront of that mission — leading talented engineering teams to design, build and operate business-critical applications and digital products. This is a role where people leadership meets technical depth, where strategic thinking meets hands-on problem-solving, and where your decisions create real, measurable impact for users and the business alike.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and develop a team of application engineers, setting clear expectations, supporting individual growth and fostering an inclusive, collaborative and accountable team culture.
• Own end-to-end delivery across the full application lifecycle — from discovery and planning through solution design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance and continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with product owners, business stakeholders, architects and technology teams to clarify requirements, shape priorities and align the technical roadmap with business objectives.
• Guide architectural and engineering decisions, balancing scalability, security, resilience, maintainability, cost-efficiency and speed of delivery.
• Champion strong engineering practices, including clean code, design patterns, Domain-Driven Design, automated testing, code reviews, CI/CD pipelines and agile ways of working.
• Stay close to the codebase and contribute hands-on when it matters most — complex design choices, critical incidents, prototypes and technical problem-solving.
• Ensure operational excellence through appropriate monitoring, alerting, incident management, root-cause analysis and timely follow-up actions.
• Manage technical debt and application risks transparently, establishing clear priorities and driving remediation in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
• Create effective team rhythms, leverage engineering metrics meaningfully and remove impediments that affect quality, flow or reliability.
• Cultivate a culture of learning, encouraging knowledge sharing, experimentation and continuous development across the broader engineering community.

About the Team

The Application Engineering team at Swiss Re is a group of passionate engineers dedicated to designing, developing and operating the business applications and digital products that power Swiss Re's operations. The team works at the intersection of technology and business, translating complex requirements into scalable, secure and reliable solutions. With a strong focus on engineering excellence, collaboration and continuous improvement, the team plays a pivotal role in enabling Swiss Re to anticipate and manage risk on a global scale.

About You

You are a pragmatic and curious engineering leader who cares deeply about people, product outcomes and technical quality in equal measure. You thrive on solving complex problems, can seamlessly shift between strategic thinking and hands-on delivery, and have a natural ability to communicate technical trade-offs clearly to diverse audiences — from engineers to senior business stakeholders.

We Are Looking for Candidates Who Meet These Requirements:

• Proven people leadership experience managing, leading and motivating software or application engineering teams in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong hands-on software engineering background in object-oriented languages such as Java, .NET or TypeScript, combined with solid experience in cloud-based architectures.
• Deep understanding of software architecture, including design patterns, APIs, integration approaches and scalable system design.
• Experience building and operating secure, reliable and resilient customer-facing or business-critical applications.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, provide constructive feedback and create meaningful, individualised development paths.

These Are Additional Nice to Haves:

• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, distributed databases and integration patterns.
• Familiarity with principles and patterns such as SOLID, GRASP, DRY and CUPID.
• Knowledge of DevSecOps, cloud-native engineering, infrastructure as code and automated quality controls.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications or platforms while maintaining business continuity.
• Background working in a regulated industry or in environments with strong security, risk and compliance requirements.
• Practical knowledge of monitoring, alerting, observability, incident response and production support.
• Experience working with agile methodologies and delivering high-quality software products iteratively.
• Professional proficiency in English; additional language skills are a plus.

Our company has a hybrid work model where the expectation is that you will be in the office at least three days per week.