Auto-Owners Insurance Internship Opportunities

Winter Tech Updates from Auto-Owners

The Auto-Owners IT Division is looking forward to this upcoming winter recruiting season! We continue to seek your assistance in hiring the brightest and best technical talent for software development, security, infrastructure, UX, and data warehousing positions. We also have a few remaining summer internships for 2020!

Our updates for this season include:

·         Modernizing Development for Efficiency, Automation, and Security

·         Robotic Process Automation

·         Our First Ever A-O Hackathon

Modernizing the Way We Develop Software

We are putting significant investments into new procedures and tools that allow us to analyze, plan, and execute software development projects faster and more efficiently. For many years we have used a home-grown application to track work and are modernizing that by use of industry standard products that have a far richer feature set. In addition, we are investing in new technology which will allow us to release applications in a more automated fashion. Using concepts drawn from continuous delivery, we are automating even more components of our software development lifecycle – such as how the code is packaged for deployment, and automating scanning our code for security vulnerabilities. It’s an exciting time to be involved in software development at Auto-Owners!

Robotic Process Automation

This fall, Auto-Owners started creating our first software robot using Robotic Process Automation software. These software “bots” are being programmed to execute the steps of a business process that involve mundane and repetitive tasks. This allows our associates to focus on work that requires decision making and critical thinking skills. Bots can be configured to capture and interpret data and interact with applications. 

Here are some examples of tasks the bot has done:

·         Extract information from a website

·         Input information into a website

·         Spreadsheet processing to extract or populate data

·         Interact with client software

We are excited about what this technology will do in the way of automating tasks because it has the potential to save literal years of manual, tedious work!

1^st Ever A-O Hackathon

Our very first associate-only hackathon was an opportunity for participants to work on a creative software project of their choosing. It could be something to help their team at work, a passion project, or anything in between. During twelve hours, teams designed, implemented, and demoed the software projects. At the very end, a team was voted the “Hackathon Champions” and bestowed with the Hackathon Trophy. We had an impressive number of different languages, platforms, and technologies used by the teams. Kotlin, Unity, Kubernetes, Virtual Reality, React/Redux, Python, R, Spark, and SQL Server were used to name a few, but there were many more. With these tools, the participants created things ranging from an IT DevOps-style system dashboard to an interactive virtual reality Lego building game. As software developers, the best way to learn is by doing, and that’s exactly what our hackathon enabled. The event was a big success, and we look forward to facilitating future hackathons similar to this for future employees of Auto-Owners.

Please share these updates and our company information with any of your students who may be seeking a paid internship or full-time tech position. We look forward to working with you this season and wish you a successful semester!