Application Engineer - II

This role provides intermediate-level application engineering, system analysis, design, development, implementation, and production support for Vanguard's retirement and participant experience platforms. The engineer contributes to modernization initiatives, cloud-native application development, UI and backend services, API integrations, observability, secure software delivery, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. This position plays a key role in modernizing retirement termination experiences and requires an engineer who can balance software development, production support, cloud operations, and reliability practices to deliver secure, scalable, resilient, and maintainable solutions.

Core Responsibilities & Skills

Software Engineering & Technical Skills

• Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, and Java.

• Preferably a full-stack engineer who is comfortable working across both UI and backend services.

• Experience designing, developing, testing, deploying, and supporting applications throughout the software development lifecycle.

• Strong proficiency with distributed version control systems, including Git and GitHub.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.

• Understanding of automated testing strategies and quality engineering practices.

• Familiarity with observability concepts, including logging, metrics, tracing, production monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.

• Knowledge of Secure SDLC principles, secure coding practices, and data protection expectations.

• Ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues across development, testing, and production environments, including AWS-hosted applications and legacy system integrations.

• Experience or interest in SRE practices, including SLOs, operational readiness, resiliency testing, runbooks, and incident response.

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support modern web applications, with an emphasis on Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, and Java.

• Translate functional and technical requirements into scalable, maintainable, and reliable software solutions.

• Contribute to application architecture, technical design discussions, and engineering best practices.

• Participate in code reviews and provide constructive feedback to peers.

• Develop and support APIs, backend services, and integrations with third-party and enterprise platforms.

• Contribute to modernization efforts that replace legacy systems and migrate business capabilities to modern architectures .

• Support application performance, reliability, and operational maturity through thoughtful design, testing, and observability practices.

• Experience working within Agile product teams.

• Collaborate effectively with product owners, engineers, architects, testers, and business partners to deliver high-value solutions.

• Contribute to operational support, incident management, and continuous improvement efforts.

• Ability to work effectively both independently and within cross-functional teams.

• Partner with support, platform, architecture, and operations teams to improve application reliability, availability, and production readiness.

• Participate in planning, refinement, sprint reviews, retrospectives, release activities, resiliency exercises, game days, and post-release validation.

• Create and maintain operational documentation, troubleshooting guides, support procedures, and production runbooks.

• Strong problem-solving and analytical capabilities.

• Demonstrated ownership, accountability, and follow-through.

• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Ability to build effective partnerships across teams and contribute to shared outcomes.

• Comfortable operating in a dynamic environment with evolving priorities.

• Eagerness to learn new technologies and continuously expand technical expertise.

• Production-support mindset with the ability to remain focused, organized, and client-centered when resolving operational issues.

• Continuous improvement mindset with a willingness to strengthen processes, observability, quality, and reliability over time.

• Minimum of three years related work experience, with at least one year of development experience.
• Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience.