Inside Applied Systems: Engineering and AI Careers – Built In

What Engineering Work Is Like at Applied Systems

Noel Massarelli, a senior software engineer on Applied Systems’ EZLynx accounting team, was hired to write server-side code that customers would never see.

Within two years, Massarelli owned an entire product from front to back, from the database to the button a customer clicks. When the team needed a UI developer, she made the case to take it on, and the answer was simple: It’s yours.

That is the shape of engineering at Applied Systems. The company builds the software that thousands of insurance agencies and brokerages run their businesses on, across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. The problems are large, the data is real, and the work moves into products that customers depend on to run their day-to-day operations. 

Below, Massarelli and three other Applied Systems team members share how they’re empowered to make an impact in their roles.

How Technologists at Applied Systems Take Ownership of Projects

At Applied, technical ownership can span an entire product or system. Noel Massarelli, for example, was brought in for back-end work and rebuilt the modern invoicing experience agencies use to bill customers, from server logic to the user interface. She now reviews and approves front-end code. Her way in was what she calls “code archaeology” — getting dropped into a complex system, tracing what it does and rebuilding it stronger. 

“I’m a full-stack developer, so I can engineer from front to back. When Applied needed someone to step up for the UI work, I asked for the opportunity, and the team said, ‘Run with it,’” Massarelli said. “I’ve worked in a lot of places where even if you have the skills, other teams don’t want to bring you into the fold. That hasn’t been the case here.”

That opportunity to solve problems without a predetermined answer drew AI Engineer Evonne Cho to Applied’s AI engineering team, which she joined as one of its first members. Insurance runs on dense, document-heavy work, so the team’s first shipped product was a summarizer that distills a customer’s history into something an agency can read at a glance.

“I’ve built things from the ground up before, but usually we have an idea of what we’re building from the start,” Cho said. “This was different. We started by understanding the problem space and talking with the people who work with agencies every day, then shaped what we built around what we learned.”

What Technical Challenges Do Teams Solve at Applied Systems?

Give an engineer a real problem and the authority to solve it, and they build something that lasts. Within her first months at Applied Systems, Lauren Locke, an enterprise architect, was pulled into a critical initiative: creating a single catalog that maps every service into one model and works with the engineers’ current tools. The catalog gives thousands of services one source of truth for service ownership, health and standards, and Locke drives the data model underneath it. 

“Even as a new teammate, I’ve been empowered to jump in with both feet, design the back-end model, and then drive collaboration with the full breadth of architects here to make sure the data is complete, accurate, and vetted,” Locke said.

Locke said teams at Applied evaluate ideas on their merit. Massarelli described a similar experience from the engineering side: When she wanted to prove a performance approach was faster, her architect met her with curiosity and better tooling.

“I feel empowered here, and my leaders are open to discussion and feedback,” Massarelli said.

How Technical Work at Applied Systems Impacts Customers

What makes the work at Applied Systems matter? It reaches customers. Just ask Leen Alawieh, a data science manager, who, within months of joining the company, was given ownership over Applied Systems’ reconciliation engine, the system that reads carrier commission and payable statements, validates the numbers and flags discrepancies that once took agencies more than 15 hours a week to identify manually.

“I was trusted with a major product even though I was new. I get to own the data science behind the reconciliation engine, and it’s exciting to have a role in such a critical project,” Alawieh said.

For her, the pull of insurance technology is the scale and the stakes. Insurance touches nearly everyone, the data is rich and real, and the work is grounded in a mature platform where teams are encouraged to test stronger ways of solving customer problems. 

“The problems are complex, large-scale and grounded in real-world data because everyone uses insurance,” Alawieh said. “You’re building on something well-established, and our teams are open to suggesting new ways of doing things. Thousands of agencies rely on Applied, so anything I build can reach customers globally.”

The reconciliation engine is designed around one of the most manual, high-stakes workflows agencies manage. Every product ships against a workflow someone depends on, which raises the bar for what gets built and how quickly it makes an impact. Cho, who now works in corporate data services, said there is a quality standard at Applied Systems that pervades every team: a high bar for code, fast delivery and a lot of learning in the process.

What It’s Like to Work With AI at Applied Systems

Across teams at Applied Systems, ownership is a consistent theme. Even as Applied Systems expands its use of AI, employees remain responsible for the judgment, architecture and decisions behind the work. 

“We use AI to accelerate the work so we can focus more on developing new things, faster, and with intention,” Alawieh said.

The tooling moves quickly, but the judgment, architecture and decisions stay with the people, and that is the part that makes the work worth doing, Cho said.

“If you want to go somewhere you can really make a difference every day, with teammates who are genuinely kind and helpful, this is it,” Cho said.