Junior Java Developer Jobs in Fort Wayne, IN (NOW HIRING)

Location: Van Wert, OH; Dublin, OH
Work Model: Hybrid 
Position type: Full time - salary 

We’re a team of employees passionate about delivering best-in-class customer service and innovation in the industry. Integrity, relationships, and excellence are at the heart of everything we do.

Our employees fully utilize their talents and bring their best selves to work. We believe who you are is just as important as what you do!

Join a high-impact engineering team at the heart of our personal lines insurance business, where the systems you build power critical customer experiences and core operations. As a Software Engineer, you’ll design and enhance platforms that support policy administration, working across a diverse set of applications to ensure they are reliable, scalable, and built to evolve with the needs of the business.

In this collaborative role, you’ll partner closely with product managers, engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver end-to-end solutions. You’ll contribute to design discussions, participate in agile development, and share ideas to continuously improve how we build and work together. Your contributions will help modernize systems, strengthen integrations, and improve data flow—while writing clean, maintainable code and advancing engineering best practices.

This is an opportunity to make a meaningful impact on a critical business area while growing your technical skills in an environment that values teamwork, ownership, and continuous learning.

Key Responsibilities of the Role  

• Practice AI-first development by using AI tools (such as Claude Code) to generate code, pull requests, tests, and design options that the engineer reviews, validates, and refines.
• Actively evaluate whether agentic or AI-driven solutions are appropriate for a given problem and implement them when they provide leverage over traditional deterministic approaches.
• Maintain strong engineering discipline by validating AI output, ensuring appropriate test coverage, and holding delivered solutions to reliability, security, and quality standards.
• Own the delivery of assigned work from design through implementation by ensuring code, documentation, and artifacts are created, reviewed, and integrated according to team standards, regardless of whether they are authored by the engineer or generated with AI assistance.
• Translate high-level objectives into concrete implementation plans by analyzing designs, understanding system architecture, and determining the coding, integration, and configuration work required.
• Ensure appropriate testing is in place (unit, integration, schema, and verification tests) by reviewing test coverage, validating outcomes, and improving the test strategy.
• Identify, debug, and resolve issues in code or behavior using a systematic approach, and propose improvements to testing strategies, CI/CD pipelines, or the software delivery process.
• Apply existing patterns and approaches when designing functionality, remain mindful of introducing breaking changes, and clearly communicate risks and impacts to the team and stakeholders when changes are required.
• Choose between existing and new patterns or techniques with minimal guidance, and clearly communicate trade-offs when selecting one approach over another.
• Collaborate actively with engineers, product managers, and stakeholders to implement changes, verify expected behavior, and incorporate feedback into delivered solutions.
• Communicate progress, risks, and blockers regularly to the team, and participate in pairing, design discussions, and reviews as expected by the team’s working agreements.
• Conduct and participate in peer reviews by focusing on correctness, maintainability, testability, and alignment with team standards, regardless of how the code was produced.
• Provide constructive feedback to peers, including junior engineers, on code organization, testability, and adherence to agreed-upon patterns and practices.
• Seek feedback from more senior engineers through mechanisms such as peer review, RFC-based development, pairing, or stand-ups, and apply that feedback to improve solutions.
• Coach newer engineers on team norms, tools, processes, and documentation, helping them understand why standards exist, not just what they are.
• Contribute feedback to team and organizational standards by sharing what is working, what is friction-heavy, and what could improve delivery and developer effectiveness.
• Apply security policies and tooling appropriately, understand compliance requirements, and raise risks or concerns early during design and implementation.
• Understand the team’s monitoring and operational philosophy, use available operational data to reason about system behavior, and incorporate observability considerations into solution delivery.
• Build productive working relationships with internal and outsourced development partners by communicating clearly about design decisions, progress, and issue resolution.
• Develop an understanding of the team’s role in the business value chain and use knowledge of user pain points and workflows to inform implementation decisions.
•  

Required Qualifications  

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• Or Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 2 years related experience
• Or 4 years related experience

 
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities  

• Working knowledge of modern software systems and architectures, including cloud-native applications and distributed services, with an understanding of how components interact within a larger system.
• Ability to use AI-assisted development tools effectively and to review, validate, and refine AI-generated code, tests, designs, and documentation.
• Ability to translate high-level objectives into implementable solutions by analyzing requirements, system constraints, and existing architectural patterns.
• Practical understanding of end-to-end software delivery, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support.
• Knowledge of testing and quality practices, including evaluating test coverage and effectiveness across unit, integration, and verification testing.
• Proficiency in at least one primary programming language and supporting technologies used by the team (e.g., Java, SQL, .NET, Go, C), with the ability to reason about and modify code regardless of how it was produced.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including systematic debugging and reasoning through trade-offs between solution approaches.
• Understanding of security, reliability, and compliance considerations, and the ability to apply team and organizational policies during design and delivery.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills, including participation in peer review, design discussions, and feedback loops with engineers and stakeholders.
• Awareness of operational and monitoring practices and the ability to use production signals to assess whether solutions are behaving as intended.

Total Rewards

Central establishes base pay based on several factors including labor market data and an evaluation of candidate qualifications relative to role requirements. Base pay is one component of a comprehensive total rewards package designed to support employees’ financial, health, career, and retirement objectives. Central provides extensive health and wellness benefits to promote flexibility, work-life balance, and long-term financial security. For more information, see Central Insurance Benefits