Concord Group Insurance
Programmer Analyst
Bedford, New Hampshire
January 2014 – May 2016
Concord Group Insurance was my first professional development role after college and the company where I completed my internship before transitioning into a full-time programmer analyst position.
This role was where I first learned what it meant to build and maintain software that real businesses relied on every day. It was my introduction to enterprise development, business systems, production support, internal tooling, underwriting workflows, and the realities of maintaining software in a professional environment.
Starting My Professional Career
I originally joined Concord Group Insurance as an intern while attending NHTI – Concord's Community College. Shortly before graduating, I was offered a full-time position as a Programmer Analyst and began working directly on internal insurance and underwriting systems.
The transition from school into a professional development environment was one of the most important learning experiences of my career. It taught me how software actually supports real business operations, how technical decisions affect users, and how important reliability and maintainability become once systems are being actively used every day.
I quickly became involved in application development, issue resolution, database work, reporting systems, and internal tooling improvements used by underwriting and business teams throughout the organization.
Core Development Work
At Concord Group Insurance I primarily worked with C#, ASP.NET MVC, MSSQL, JavaScript, jQuery, and HTML5 to support and improve internal business systems.
- Developed and maintained ASP.NET MVC web applications.
- Worked with MSSQL databases supporting underwriting and billing systems.
- Created and updated internal reporting tools.
- Worked directly with underwriting teams to improve workflows and resolve operational issues.
- Supported maintenance tasks, issue resolution, feature requests, and business-driven development work.
- Participated in large internal projects involving insurance workflows and business automation.
This role gave me strong exposure to enterprise-style application development, structured business systems, database-backed workflows, and software that directly supported day-to-day company operations.
USB Licensed Reporting Automation Project
One of the largest and most memorable projects I worked on at Concord Group Insurance involved a proprietary reporting system that only had a single USB hardware license available for an entire underwriting department.
The underwriters all needed access to the reporting system, but physically passing the USB key between employees was inefficient and created operational problems. I was tasked alongside another developer with finding a way to centralize and automate the process.
We designed a centralized execution workflow using a dedicated Windows machine that permanently hosted the USB license. We then built supporting automation systems around it that continuously monitored a database-backed queue for incoming report requests submitted through a web interface.
When a request entered the queue, the automation system would:
- Pull the request details from the database queue.
- Programmatically execute the reporting software on the licensed machine.
- Generate the requested report.
- Collect the resulting output files.
- Email the completed report directly back to the requesting user.
- Move on to the next queued request automatically.
Looking back, it was a creative and practical solution to a real business limitation, especially for one of my earliest large professional projects. More importantly, it taught me how valuable automation can be when solving operational bottlenecks and resource limitations.
That project also helped reinforce a mindset that would follow me throughout the rest of my career:
If a repetitive business process creates friction, there is usually a way to automate or simplify it.
Professional Growth
Concord Group Insurance gave me my first real exposure to working inside a professional software environment with deadlines, production systems, users, and operational expectations.
It was where I learned how to:
- Work directly with non-technical business teams.
- Build software around real operational workflows.
- Maintain production systems responsibly.
- Troubleshoot issues affecting users and departments.
- Balance business needs with technical limitations.
- Write software intended to be maintained long-term.
The experience and foundation I gained there directly prepared me for the much larger scale startup engineering and leadership work I later moved into at C3 Metrics.
Key Takeaways From This Role
This was the role where I stopped thinking like a student writing assignments and started thinking like an engineer building systems businesses actually depended on.
Even though it was early in my career, this position helped shape the practical engineering mindset I still carry today: understand the real business problem, build something reliable, automate what you can, and leave the system better than you found it.