Senior .Net Engineer (Contractor)

Introduction:

The Zebra is looking for a Senior .NET Engineer (Contract) to maintain and extend our internal Dynamic Insurance Rating Tool (DIRT). DIRT powers our SEO and content initiatives by generating insurance rating data used in reports, landing pages, and consumer-facing experiences.

The primary focus will be the DIRT Server, a C#/.NET application that integrates with Quadrant’s .NET Toolkit DLL to generate insurance rating data and export results. This includes responsibility for stability, performance, deployment, and monitoring.

Your primary responsibility will be owning and optimizing the DIRT Server, a C#/.NET application built on a third-party .NET Toolkit, with end-to-end accountability for stability, performance, deployment, and monitoring

As a secondary responsibility, you’ll also maintain the DIRT Client, a stakeholder-facing UI for initiating data requests, ensuring it remains reliable and aligned with evolving workflows. This role is critical to enabling The Zebra’s SEO and content teams with fresh, accurate, and scalable data to power reports and data-driven landing pages.

What you'll do:

• Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented C#/.NET code.

• Maintain and extend the DIRT Server applications.

• Integrate with third-party .NET toolkits (DLLs) to request and process insurance data sets.

• Implement improvements to data export and formatting data ETL pipelines (CSV generation and downstream delivery).

• Optimize application performance and reliability to handle high-throughput requests efficiently.

• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot DIRT server instances (currently hosted on AWS SQS).

• Ensure proper handling of coverage limits and state-level insurance regulations when making rating requests.

• Collaborate with SEO stakeholders to support new data-driven content initiatives.

• Architect future improvements to DIRT for scalability and integration into SEO and marketing workflows.

What we're looking for

• Strong expertise in C# and .NET development.

• Direct experience working with DLLs, particularly integrating third-party DLLs into .NET applications.

• Experience with REST APIs and database integration (SQL Server, Snowflake, or similar).

• Familiarity with export pipelines (e.g., CSV generation, S3 buckets, downstream data usage).

• Comfort with deploying and monitoring applications in AWS, especially EC2 and SQS, or similar environments.

• Ability to troubleshoot and optimize performance in high-throughput data processing systems.

• Strong communication skills to work across SEO, engineering, and analytics stakeholders.
  

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with insurance rating engines or third-party data APIs.

• Familiarity with Snowflake or similar data warehousing solutions

• Familiarity with Looker or similar business intelligence platforms like Tableau

• Knowledge of SEO workflows or data-driven content generation.

• Experience with React or Next.js frameworks to contribute to the DIRT client front-end.
  

Impact

By maintaining and extending DIRT, you will directly enable The Zebra’s SEO and content teams to publish accurate, fresh, and authoritative insurance data. This role is critical in helping The Zebra compete with top industry players by delivering trusted, data-backed insights at scale.

Contract Details

• Type: Contract role (6–12 months, with potential extensions).

• Engagement: 40 hours per week.

• Location: Remote (U.S. preferred).

• Reporting to: Engineering Manager, SEO Tooling.

• Rate: $75-$80 Hourly