Manager, IT Application Support in West Des Moines, Iowa at Homesteaders Life Company Corp

As a Manager, IT Application Support – Policy Operations, you will be responsible for leading a team of application engineers who provide production support, incident management, and operational stewardship for our policy administration system processes. This role has direct accountability for successful execution, monitoring, support, and continuous improvement of the organization’s Policy Administration Cycle.

The manager will lead a team of engineers participating in on-call and overnight support rotations, establish operational excellence, drive automation and observability initiatives, and build operation knowledge to reduce risk. This leader service is the primary owner for cycle reliability, support readiness, incident response coordination, and production support governance.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Application Support Leadership: Leads and develops an Application Support & Delivery team responsible for supporting & maintaining critical business applications and operational processes. Establish team goals, performance expectations, support standards, and development plans while fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Overnight Policy Administration Cycle Operations: Owns the successful execution, monitoring, support, and continuous improvement of the overnight Policy Administration Cycle. Ensures nightly processing completes accurately and within defined service levels while coordinating issue resolution and recovery activities when failures occur.
• Incident & Major Event Management: Directs response efforts for production incidents, system outages, and cycle disruptions. Serves as the primary point of coordination during major events, ensuring timely communication, escalation, business impact assessment, and resolution of critical issues.
• On-Call Program Administration: Establishes and manages on-call schedules, support rotations, escalation procedures, and after-hours support processes. Ensures adequate staffing coverage and support readiness while promoting knowledge sharing and operational accountability across the team.
• Knowledge Management & Documentation: Ensures support procedures, runbooks, troubleshooting guides, recovery plans, and operational documentation are maintained and kept current. Promotes knowledge transfer activities to reduce dependency on individual contributors and improve organizational resiliency.
• Monitoring & Operational Readiness: Oversees application monitoring, job scheduling, alerting, and operational dashboards. Ensures proactive identification of issues, validates operational readiness, and maintains visibility into the health and performance of critical systems and processes.
• Policy Administration Subject Matter Leadership: Establishes a deep understanding of policy administration processing, dependencies, integrations, and business impacts. Serves as the operational leader responsible for ensuring support teams possess the knowledge and capabilities necessary to maintain reliable policy administration operations.
• Team Culture & Employee Engagement: Builds a highly engaged support organization through coaching, recognition, career development, and clear expectations. Encourages ownership, collaboration, innovation, and a customer-focused mindset throughout the team.

• 5+ years of progressive, applicable experience working with application development tools and processes.
• 2+ years .NET framework experience
• 2+ years’ experience utilizing SQL Server
• Understanding systems development methodology best practices.
• Knowledge of agile methodologies, techniques, and tools; minimum of two years agile experience
• Experience supporting overnight and on-call processes
• Policy Administration system experience is a plus

Pay and Benefits Summary:

Our benefits include:

• An excellent schedule – office closes at 1 p.m. every Friday
• Annual profit sharing
• 401(k) with company match with discretionary contribution
• Company-sponsored group medical and dental insurance
• Company-paid life insurance
• Company-paid long-term disability
• Hybrid work environment
• Paid holidays
• Generous vacation time and sick leave
• Paid parental leave
• Casual dress year-round

About Homesteaders:

Homesteaders Life Company, a mutual company owned by its policy holders, is a national leader providing products and services to help people design a better farewell. Founded in 1906, Homesteaders is known for secure preneed funding and innovative solutions that help funeral and end-of-life professionals and consumers connect with each other.

We are currently hiring in AL, FL, GA, IA, IN, KS, LA, MI, MS, MT, NC, NE, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, WI, WV.

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.