Wells Fargo

Principal Engineer Automation

Wells Fargo • $135K — $160K *
Charlotte, NC 28269In-Person
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of engineering experience across various domains including software, platform, and cloud engineering.
  • 5+ years in designing, developing, testing, and supporting production-grade software or enterprise integration services.
  • 3+ years of advanced software development experience with Python and at least one other modern programming language.
  • 3+ years designing and developing APIs, microservices, or event-driven systems.
  • 3+ years experience with containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
  • 3+ years integrating systems through REST APIs and other service interfaces.
  • Demonstrated leadership in technical design across multiple teams or platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Act as a trusted technical advisor to influence software architecture decisions for complex needs.
  • Lead resolution of unique engineering challenges by delivering secure and maintainable solutions.
  • Design and develop software platforms, APIs, and reusable components for network capabilities.
  • Define software architectures for distributed systems, ensuring proper integration and recovery models.
  • Establish engineering standards for application structure, API design, and production readiness.
  • Build and evolve internal engineering platforms with standardized workflows and developer experiences.
  • Define durable workflows for infrastructure processes using sophisticated orchestration technologies.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work environment focused on innovation and engineering excellence.
  • Opportunities for professional development and technical mentorship.
  • Access to the latest technologies and tools in cloud-native engineering and AI.
  • Engagement in strategic projects that influence organizational direction.
  • Dynamic and diverse team with a focus on knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
Full Job Description
In This Role, You Will
Software Architecture and Engineering
  • Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior leadership, influencing the architecture and development of applications, platforms, APIs, network automation services, information security capabilities, data systems, operating environments, and cloud-native technologies for highly complex business and technical needs across multiple organizations.
  • Lead the strategy and resolution of highly complex and unique engineering challenges requiring evaluation across multiple technology domains, delivering solutions that are long-term, large-scale, secure, resilient, and maintainable.
  • Design and develop production-grade software platforms, APIs, microservices, SDKs, libraries, automation frameworks, and reusable components that enable network and infrastructure engineering capabilities across the enterprise.
  • Define software architectures for distributed, event-driven, and asynchronous systems, including service boundaries, data contracts, workflow states, integration patterns, failure handling, concurrency, consistency, and recovery models.
  • Establish software engineering standards for application structure, API design, code quality, automated testing, secure development, dependency management, versioning, release engineering, observability, and production readiness.
  • Develop reference implementations and contribute directly to high-value or technically complex portions of the platform, particularly where new patterns, technologies, or engineering standards must be proven.
  • Lead technical design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, failure-mode analysis, and production-readiness assessments for critical platform capabilities.
Platform Engineering and Developer Experience
  • Build and evolve internal engineering platforms that provide self-service automation, standardized workflows, reusable services, governed execution paths, and consistent developer experiences.
  • Treat shared engineering platforms as products, with clearly defined users, service contracts, roadmaps, adoption measures, documentation, support models, and reliability objectives.
  • Create paved roads and golden paths that enable engineering teams to develop, test, certify, release, and operate automation through approved patterns rather than one-off implementations.
  • Improve developer productivity through reusable APIs, templates, software development kits, CI/CD pipelines, test harnesses, local development environments, documentation, and automated onboarding.
  • Reduce duplicated engineering effort and operational toil by converting common functions into reusable platform services, shared libraries, automation modules, and supported integration patterns.
  • Establish appropriate boundaries among platform ownership, application ownership, production execution, operational support, and risk decision-making.
Workflow Orchestration and Automation
  • Design durable workflows for long-running, failure-prone, approval-dependent infrastructure and network processes using Temporal, Celery, or comparable workflow and asynchronous execution technologies.
  • Define patterns for workflows, activities, workers, task queues, events, signals, timers, retries, timeouts, compensating actions, versioning, idempotency, replay safety, and human approval gates.
  • Build workflow capabilities that preserve state across failures, support controlled resumption, provide complete execution history, and maintain alignment among technical validation, business approval, and production execution.
  • Create reusable workflow components for intake, validation, certification, release approval, change alignment, deployment, verification, rollback, evidence collection, exception handling, and closeout.
  • Define clear execution boundaries among orchestration services, CI/CD platforms, approval systems, source-of-truth platforms, AI advisory services, and automation execution engines.
API, Integration, and Data Engineering
  • Design and implement RESTful, event-driven, streaming, and standards-based integrations among enterprise platforms, network infrastructure, source-of-truth systems, workflow engines, observability services, artifact repositories, and change-management systems.
  • Define stable, versioned service contracts and data models that allow platform components to evolve independently while maintaining compatibility, security, and traceability.
  • Build integrations using technologies and protocols such as REST, RESTCONF, NETCONF, gRPC, webhooks, message queues, event streams, OpenAPI specifications, and structured data formats.
  • Develop data pipelines and services that collect, validate, normalize, correlate, and expose network state, software lifecycle data, workflow execution data, telemetry, release evidence, and operational outcomes.
  • Establish patterns for data quality, lineage, ownership, freshness, access control, retention, reconciliation, and authoritative-source designation.
  • Integrate network source-of-truth platforms such as Nautobot or NetBox with automation services, workflow orchestration, intended-state models, actual-state telemetry, compliance checks, and drift-detection processes.
Cloud-Native Engineering and CI/CD
  • Design, build, and operate containerized services using Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Helm, and comparable cloud-native technologies.
  • Develop CI/CD and GitOps capabilities that automate build, testing, security validation, policy enforcement, artifact promotion, environment deployment, and release verification.
  • Establish engineering patterns for promoting software and configuration safely across development, test, UAT, and production environments.
  • Implement Infrastructure as Code and configuration automation using technologies such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Helm, and Kubernetes manifests.
  • Define standards for source control, branching, pull requests, protected branches, release tags, artifact integrity, dependency controls, and environment-specific configuration.
  • Build automated test capabilities across unit, component, contract, integration, regression, performance, resiliency, and end-to-end testing.
Reliability, Observability, and Production Engineering
  • Design highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable systems that can support mission-critical engineering and infrastructure workflows.
  • Establish service-level indicators, service-level objectives, error budgets, availability targets, capacity expectations, and production-readiness requirements for platform services.
  • Design observability architectures using metrics, logs, traces, events, flow data, streaming telemetry, and business-level workflow indicators.
  • Implement dashboards, alerts, service health indicators, dependency views, and diagnostic capabilities using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, and distributed tracing platforms.
  • Lead the development of automated detection, diagnostics, remediation, rollback, and evidence-capture patterns.
  • Apply failure-mode analysis, resilience testing, controlled fault injection, capacity testing, and performance engineering to identify risks before production adoption.
  • Ensure platform teams receive actionable health information rather than relying solely on infrastructure alerts or manual investigation.
AI-Enabled Software Engineering
  • Design and develop governed AI-assisted engineering services that improve knowledge discovery, software development, test generation, release analysis, operational diagnostics, evidence summarization, and engineering decision support.
  • Build AI application capabilities using retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, structured outputs, tool integration, model evaluation, and human-in-the-loop approval patterns.
  • Develop knowledge services that use approved and authoritative engineering sources, including standards, documentation, software repositories, release evidence, test results, network state, telemetry, and operational history.
  • Establish clear boundaries between AI recommendation and production execution. AI-generated recommendations must remain explainable, traceable, reviewable, and subject to approved policy or human controls.
  • Define evaluation methods for source grounding, retrieval quality, response accuracy, unsupported claims, recommendation usefulness, and operational risk.
  • Partner with security, data, risk, legal, compliance, and AI governance teams to ensure AI-enabled capabilities meet enterprise requirements.
Security, Risk, and Governance
  • Embed security, resiliency, auditability, and policy enforcement into software architecture and platform design rather than treating them as post-development activities.
  • Design identity, authorization, secrets management, service account, certificate, data protection, and least-privilege patterns for platform services and integrations.
  • Establish guardrails that prevent unauthorized execution, bypass of required approvals, unverified artifact promotion, uncontrolled configuration changes, or use of untrusted data.
  • Ensure platform actions and workflow transitions produce sufficient evidence for troubleshooting, compliance, risk review, and audit.
  • Partner with Information Security and Risk organizations to translate policies and standards into enforceable software controls and measurable engineering requirements.
  • Identify technical risks proactively and lead the design and implementation of appropriate mitigation strategies.
Technical Strategy and Organizational Leadership
  • Translate leadership vision, business priorities, and enterprise technology objectives into executable software strategies, architectural roadmaps, platform capabilities, and engineering initiatives.
  • Provide vision, direction, and technical expertise to leadership on major engineering investments, modernization opportunities, platform decisions, and emerging technologies.
  • Influence engineering direction across multiple teams and organizations without relying on direct management authority.
  • Define reusable architecture patterns and drive consistent implementation across software, infrastructure, network, reliability, and automation teams.
  • Mentor senior engineers, technical leads, architects, and emerging principal engineers through design collaboration, code review, technical forums, and structured knowledge sharing.
  • Maintain knowledge of industry engineering practices, software frameworks, cloud-native platforms, AI technologies, observability methods, and network automation developments.
  • Evaluate new technologies through prototypes and evidence-based assessments, then define adoption guidance, implementation patterns, and production-readiness criteria.
  • Promote a culture of engineering ownership, automation, measurement, experimentation, documentation, and continuous improvement.
Required Qualifications

  • 7+ years of Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education

  • 7+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, network automation, SRE, NRE, or equivalent experience demonstrated through one or a combination of work experience, training, military experience, or education.
  • 5+ years of experience designing, developing, testing, and supporting production-grade software, distributed systems, automation platforms, or enterprise integration services.
  • 3 plus years of Advanced software development experience using Python and at least one additional modern programming language such as Go, Java, C#, .NET, or TypeScript.
  • 3+ years experience designing and developing APIs, microservices, asynchronous services, event-driven systems, workflow services, or comparable distributed software components.
  • 3 plus years of experience developing software using Git-based workflows, pull requests, peer review, versioning, package management, CI/CD, automated testing, and release management.
  • 3 plus years of experience deploying or supporting containerized applications using Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, or comparable container orchestration platforms.
  • 3 plus years of experience integrating multiple systems through REST APIs, webhooks, messaging, events, SDKs, or service interfaces.
  • 3 plus years of experience designing for scalability, availability, resiliency, observability, security, and operational support.
Desired Qualifications
Principal-Level Software Leadership
  • Strong knowledge of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, modular design, object-oriented or functional design, design patterns, concurrency, error handling, automated testing, and performance optimization.
  • Demonstrated experience leading technical design or architecture across multiple engineering teams, platforms, or organizational boundaries.
  • Strong analytical and systems-thinking skills with the ability to decompose ambiguous, enterprise-scale problems into executable engineering solutions.
  • Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to explain complex software and architecture decisions to engineering teams, technology leaders, and executive stakeholders.
  • Prior experience in a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, Software Architect, Platform Architect, or comparable technica

About Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo Careers

Joining Wells Fargo means becoming part of a distinguished financial institution that has been a cornerstone of innovation and leadership in the banking industry. At Wells Fargo, we offer a plethora of job opportunities designed to empower your career growth and development in a diverse and inclusive environment.

Work You’ll Do

At Wells Fargo, you will be part of a team that values diversity and is committed to fostering an inclusive culture. We are looking for professionals who are eager to drive innovation and lead with integrity. Our employees are our greatest asset, and we invest in their professional growth through comprehensive leadership and diversity training programs that are recognized industry-wide.

Explore a Multitude of Career Paths

Whether you're interested in a position in finance, IT, customer service, or management, Wells Fargo has career opportunities in various fields. Our team members benefit from job stability, competitive benefits, and a culture that values and rewards performance and dedication.

Internship Programs

Kickstart your career with a Wells Fargo internship. Our programs provide invaluable industry exposure, professional skills development, and networking opportunities that often lead to full-time employment offers. Interns at Wells Fargo work on real projects, solve actual challenges, and gain the mentorship of seasoned professionals.

Professional Growth and Development

We believe in nurturing the potential of our employees. Wells Fargo offers robust training programs and resources to help every team member excel in their current roles and prepare for future challenges. Growth at Wells Fargo is not just about climbing the career ladder but expanding your skills and expertise to add value to our team and customers.

Benefits and Rewards

Wells Fargo is committed to the well-being of our team members. We offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes health care, retirement plans, and generous paid time off. Additionally, we provide unique perks like employee discounts, adoption assistance, and tuition reimbursement.

Join Our Team

Discover the opportunities waiting for you at Wells Fargo by exploring open positions that match your skills and interests. We are continuously hiring and looking for individuals who bring creativity, passion, and a drive to serve our customers.

Stay Connected

Keep up to date with the latest from Wells Fargo Careers by subscribing to our job alert emails. Tailor your subscription to receive updates that align with your career preferences and get insider tips on crafting the perfect resume and acing your interview.

Networking and Innovation

At Wells Fargo, networking and innovation go hand in hand. We encourage our employees to connect across departments and roles to foster new ideas and strategies that lead to groundbreaking solutions.

Empower Your Career

Step into a role at Wells Fargo where your skills will be honed, your achievements recognized, and your career can flourish. We're not just filling positions; we're building leaders who are equipped to navigate the complexities of the financial world. Join Wells Fargo today and be part of a team that’s redefining the future of banking.
Learn more about Wells Fargo
Size
246,577 employees
Market Cap
$155.2 billion
Industry
Finance & Insurance
Net Income
$3.3 billion
Founded
1852
5 Year Trend
-5.9%
NASDAQ
WFC
* Ladders Estimates

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