Principal Software Engineer
Allstate Insurance Company · United States
At Allstate, great things happen when our people work together to protect families and their belongings from life’s uncertainties. And for more than 90 years, our innovative drive has kept us a step ahead of our customers’ evolving needs. From advocating for seat belts, air bags and graduated driving laws, to being an industry leader in pricing sophistication, telematics, and, more recently, device and identity protection.
Job Description
Technology Operations, Risk & Compliance (TORC) is ACC’s first-line operating system for controls, risk management and remediation, compliance, and resilience. TORC operates at the intersection of cybersecurity, technology operations, risk, controls, compliance, resilience, and enterprise transformation, turning ACC priorities and enterprise obligations into measurable controls, actionable intelligence, accountability, and sustained risk reduction.
TORC is entering the next phase of that evolution: engineering risk and control capabilities that operate at enterprise scale. A cornerstone of this work is the Unified System of Controls (USC), a strategic ACC product intended to provide a sustainable command-and-control capability for controls, bringing together control expectations, procedures, measurement, evidence, reporting, exceptions, ownership, and accountability.
The Principal Engineer will help build the engineering function required to make that ambition real.
Job SummaryThe role will also establish close engineering partnerships with Product Security (ProdSec) and Security Operations (SecOps) across ACC, leveraging and integrating their capabilities into TORC products where appropriate and avoiding creation of parallel security engineering capabilities.
Key Responsibilities
Build and Lead the TORC Engineering Function
- Build and mature TORC's engineering capability, including the talent, engineering practices, operating model, delivery discipline, and technical competencies necessary to deliver enterprise-scale products.
- Establish an engineering culture centered on quality, automation, reliability, security, reuse, observability, and measurable outcomes.
- Build and develop a high-performing engineering organization capable of solving complex technology, risk, and control problems.
- Establish clear engineering accountability and decision rights while developing future technical leaders and strengthening engineering capability across the organization.
- Create reusable engineering patterns and capabilities that enable TORC to scale beyond individual solutions.
Deliver the Unified System of Controls (USC)
- Provide senior engineering leadership for the Unified System of Controls, translating its product direction and requirements into scalable, production-grade technology.
- Lead engineering delivery of capabilities supporting control measurement, evidence, reporting, exceptions, workflow, integration, accountability, and decision-grade insight.
- Enable the movement from point-in-time and manually intensive control processes toward sustainable capabilities supported by automation and continuous telemetry.
- Ensure USC engineering is designed for enterprise scale, sustainability, interoperability, security, reliability, and reuse.
- Establish an extensible engineering foundation that can support additional TORC and ACC strategic products over time.
Translate Strategy and Product Direction into Engineering Execution
- Partner with Digital Product leadership to convert product vision, priorities, and outcomes into executable engineering roadmaps and delivery.
- Apply sound engineering judgment to determine how capabilities should be implemented within established enterprise technology and architecture direction.
- Bring an engineering perspective into product discovery, helping teams understand technical feasibility, complexity, dependencies, scalability, and implementation tradeoffs.
- Maintain strong discipline between strategy ownership, product ownership, architecture accountability, and engineering execution.
What Success Looks Like
Success is not simply delivering a technology solution. It is establishing engineering as a durable capability within TORC.
The Principal Engineer will have:
- Built a mature, high-performing TORC engineering function with clear accountability, strong talent, disciplined engineering practices, and an outcome-oriented culture.
- Delivered significant engineering capabilities supporting the Unified System of Controls and demonstrated that USC can operate as a sustainable enterprise product.
- Created strong working relationships across Platform Consulting, Digital Product, Architecture, Product Security, Security Operations, and other ACC engineering functions.
- Established reusable engineering capabilities that can scale additional TORC and ACC strategic products.
- Increased the use of automation, integration, telemetry, and continuous measurement within TORC products.
- Demonstrated that complex risk and control challenges can increasingly be addressed through sustainable engineering rather than additional manual process.
- Established TORC Engineering as a trusted, high-impact technology partner within ACC.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field required.
- Master's degree or equivalent advanced technical experience preferred.
Experience
- 12+ years of progressive technology and engineering experience preferred.
- Significant experience leading enterprise-scale software, platform, or engineering capability.
- Demonstrated experience building or materially transforming engineering teams and engineering practices.
- Experience delivering secure, enterprise-scale applications or platforms.
- Demonstrated ability to lead highly complex initiatives spanning multiple organizations and technology domains.
- Experience translating strategy, product direction, and business requirements into engineering execution.
- Demonstrated success operating with senior executives and influencing across organizational boundaries.
Leadership & Functional Capabilities
- Exceptional engineering depth, with significant experience delivering secure, reliable, and scalable enterprise technology.
- Strong knowledge of modern software engineering, APIs, data integration, automation, cloud, telemetry, observability, reliability, and secure engineering practices.
- Ability to assess highly complex technical and business challenges, evaluate implementation options and tradeoffs, and make sound decisions in high-pressure or time-sensitive environments.
- Strong product and business orientation, with the ability to translate strategy and desired outcomes into executable engineering roadmaps, standards, reusable patterns, and delivery disciplines.
- Ability to communicate complex engineering concepts in clear business language and influence senior executives, engineering leaders, peers, and cross-functional partners without relying solely on positional authority.
- Demonstrated ability to lead across highly matrixed and distributed environments, building alignment among product, platform, architecture, cybersecurity, risk, and engineering stakeholders.
- Experience leading significant technology, engineering, or operating-model transformation and establishing the practices required to sustain change.
- Strong talent and capability-building skills, including coaching, role clarity, accountability, upskilling, and development of future technical leaders.
- Sound judgment regarding the application of modern technology, AI, and automation, including the ability to balance innovation, business value, security, and risk.
- Ability to connect engineering decisions to measurable business outcomes through analytical rigor, technology fluency, and disciplined execution.
Why This Role Matters
TORC's next evolution depends on our ability to engineer solutions to risk and control problems that historical