Company Description

Why Wellmark: We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we’ve built our reputation on over 80 years’ worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors–our members. If you’re passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today! 

Why Wellmark Technology? Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work. 

Job Description

In this formal leadership role, you will lead a team of engineers and agile team members while establishing a unified observability strategy and platform for engineering across the organization. Defines the roadmap and governance model for telemetry collection, correlation, retention, and access; develops standards for service instrumentation, tagging, and golden signals; and implements SLO/SLI frameworks that connect reliability targets to customer experience and business outcomes. Builds reusable tooling and enablement (dashboards, alert libraries, runbooks, automation, and self-service onboarding) that empowers teams to detect issues early, respond consistently, and learn from incidents through blameless postmortems and continuous improvement. Partners with product owners, solution architects, security, and operations leaders to align observability investments to strategic priorities, strengthen resilience, and manage telemetry cost and performance at scale—while coaching and developing team members and cultivating a culture of accountability, inclusion, and excellence.  

Qualifications

Preferred:   

• Prior formal leadership experience; creating clear expectations and leading toward results.
• Experience designing, implementing, or governing observability platforms at scale, including metrics, logs, and distributed tracing across multi-cloud or hybrid architectures 
• Strong analytical mindset with experience using observability and analytics tools (e.g., Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, New Relic, or similar) to drive operational and reliability improvements 
• Proven ability to define and operationalize service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets, and to connect these frameworks to customer experience and business outcomes 
• Background in site reliability engineering (SRE), observability engineering, distributed systems, or platform engineering, with the ability to operate effectively in complex cloud-native environments 
• Experience establishing instrumentation standards, telemetry schemas, and tagging strategies to enable effective correlation, root-cause analysis, and cross-service visibility 
• Ability to evaluate observability tools and platforms from scalability, performance, usability, and cost-efficiency perspectives—not solely technical implementation 
• Experience building reusable observability assets such as dashboards, alerting frameworks, runbooks, and self-service onboarding capabilities for engineering teams 
• Experience working in regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance) with an understanding of logging, monitoring, and data retention requirements for compliance and security 
• Familiarity with incident management practices, including alert tuning, on-call models, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement processes 
• Understanding of telemetry lifecycle management, including data ingestion, sampling, retention, and cost-performance optimization 

Required:  

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or related field, or direct and applicable work experience.  
• Minimum 7 years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure roles.  
• Informal leadership experience typically gained through project management or by coaching/mentoring others by providing guidance and feedback to help an employee to strengthen their knowledge and skills.  
• Experience leading teams in an agile software development environment. Experience with frameworks in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), supporting Agile Release Trains and aligning designs with Lean-Agile principles.  
• Demonstrated ability to build product roadmaps.   
• Hands on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP services and architecture.   
• Strong understanding of CI/CD infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes).   
• Strong collaboration skills with ability to build relationships across technology divisions.  
• Proven experience leading platform/shared service teams, either informally or formally, and delivering enterprise-scale solutions. Ability to think strategically and effectively communicate strategy and direction to a team.  
• Stays informed on emerging technology trends and skillsets. Proven experience implementing change initiatives and supporting a culture of innovation and creativity. Encourages team to accept and resolve challenges.  
• Ability to think strategically to communicate, organize, and implement/accomplish long-range goals.  
• Effective consulting, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. Uses data effectively and demonstrates sound judgment and decision making to drive positive outcomes.  
• Demonstrated success influencing at all levels of the organization. Builds trust, alignment, commitment, and action from others.  
• Prior experience measuring and evaluating work processes to achieve organizational goals.  
• Proven ability to be adaptable to unexpected changes or situations. Adjusts effectively to work within work structures, business processes, work requirements and culture.   
• Travel required up to 5%.  

Additional Information

a. Provide  leadership and day-to-day management of financial and human resources, primarily  focusing on employee coaching, development, performance improvement, coordination and budgeting for staff and team specific services. Support business objectives and produce results that are effective, accurate, and timely and on target to meet HR team and stakeholder needs.  

b. Ensure the team delivers incremental value aligned to cloud strategy, product roadmaps, and stakeholder needs. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to remove impediments and improve delivery velocity.  

c. Translate business objectives into actionable cloud initiatives and resourcing plans.  

d. Oversee delivery of cloud solutions using AWS, Azure or GCP, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and security standards.  

e. Partner with architects to review designs and ensure solutions meet performance, cost, and compliance requirements.  

f. Champion automation, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps practices to improve efficiency and reliability.  

g. Monitor cloud spend, capacity, and performance, proactively addressing risks and cost optimization opportunities.  

h. Serve as a liaison between the cloud engineering teams and senior technology leadership.  

i. Other duties as assigned. 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

The policy of Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is to recruit, hire, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law.

Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability at any stage of the employment application process should contact us at careers@wellmark.com

Please inform us if you meet the definition of a "Covered DoD official".

At this time, Wellmark is not considering applicants for this position that require any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) now or in the future to work in the United States. This includes, but IS NOT LIMITED TO: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, etc. For additional information around work authorization needs please refer to the following resources:Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants 

Wellmark supports and expects the responsible use of AI for our workforce! We welcome the responsible use of these tools by job seekers as well and are interested in learning from you; you will have an opportunity in the application process to share which tools you used and how you applied them.