Job Description Summary
The Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for defining and driving enterprise-scale architecture, engineering strategy, and delivery excellence across modern web platforms. This role operates at a systems and organizational level—designing, influencing, and governing solutions that span multiple teams and domains—while ensuring the development of secure, scalable, resilient, and high-performing applications using TypeScript, React, and Node.js deployed on cloud platforms.
As a recognized technical authority, the Principal Engineer leads through influence, elevates engineering maturity, and establishes standards that enable consistent, high-quality delivery at scale. This role also champions the effective adoption of AI-assisted engineering to accelerate delivery, improve code quality, and standardize practices across the enterprise.
Job Description
Responsibilities:
Enterprise Architecture & Technical Strategy
- Define and evolve enterprise-wide architecture patterns for front-end, API, and cloud-native systems, ensuring alignment with long-term business and technology strategy.
- Lead design of large-scale, distributed, and highly available systems, driving decisions across multiple teams and platforms.
- Establish and govern engineering standards, design principles, and reference architectures for TypeScript/React front ends and Node.js API ecosystems.
- Provide technical leadership in modernization initiatives (e.g., monolith to microservices, API-first, event-driven architectures, cloud-native transformation).
Delivery & Engineering Excellence
- Drive delivery of complex, cross-team initiatives with measurable business outcomes (e.g., scalability improvements, performance gains, cost optimization, reduced lead time).
- Ensure systems are designed for resilience, observability, and operability (logging, monitoring, tracing, SLOs).
- Lead end-to-end system design reviews, architecture governance, and technical decision-making across programs.
- Champion engineering quality at scale, including automated testing strategies, CI/CD maturity, and secure SDLC practices.
Technical Leadership & Influence
- Act as a technical authority and advisor to engineering leadership, product teams, and stakeholders across the organization.
- Mentor and develop senior and staff engineers; raise the bar for technical design, coding standards, and architectural thinking.
- Influence organizational direction through technical roadmaps, platform strategy, and investment recommendations.
- Lead cross-functional collaboration with product, security, infrastructure, and enterprise architecture teams.
Full-Stack & Platform Engineering
- Guide development of enterprise-grade React + TypeScript applications, establishing scalable UI architectures and shared component strategies.
- Architect and oversee Node.js API platforms with emphasis on contract-first design (OpenAPI), versioning strategies, and secure integrations.
- Define patterns for data access, caching, and API performance optimization across relational and NoSQL systems.
- Lead adoption of event-driven and real-time architectures (messaging, streaming, WebSockets) where appropriate.
Cloud & Platform Architecture
- Design and drive adoption of cloud-native architectures (AWS/Azure), including containers, serverless, and platform services.
- Establish scalable patterns for multi-environment deployment, cost optimization, and operational resilience.
- Collaborate with platform teams to define golden paths, reusable frameworks, and shared services.
AI-Assisted Engineering & Innovation
- Lead enterprise adoption of AI-assisted development practices, including code generation, test automation, documentation, and design acceleration.
- Define standards for safe, secure, and governed use of AI tools, ensuring compliance and quality.
- Quantify and drive improvements in developer productivity, code quality, and cycle time through AI-enabled workflows.
Thought Leadership & Continuous Improvement
- Stay at the forefront of emerging technologies, frameworks, and engineering practices and guide their adoption where beneficial.
- Represent engineering in executive discussions, architecture reviews, and strategic planning forums.
- Drive continuous improvement in engineering processes, tooling, and organizational capabilities.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, math, engineering, or other technical field, or equivalent experience
- Eight years of experience with database design techniques/philosophies, modern distributed applications, and microservices
- Understanding of advanced analytics and machine learning concepts and technology implementations
- Experience with big data and real time streaming analytics processing architecture
- Experience with data warehousing architecture and implementation, including source to target mappings and ETL.
- Technology or platform certifications (e.g. AWS, Microsoft)
- Expertise in coding platforms/frameworks (e.g. .NET/C#, JAVA, OOD, OOP, Functional Programming, Spring Framework, J2EE Development, OOP, Service Oriented Architecture, Dependency Injection, and Core Architecture)
- In-depth knowledge of NoSQL database technologies (e.g. MS Cosmos DB, Apache Cassandra, Amazon DynamoDB)
- Five years of development experience with cloud services (e.g. AWS/Azure) utilizing various support tools (e.g. EC2, ECS, S3, Kinesis, VMs, Blob, Cosmos, Data Factory, SQL Data warehouse, ARM Templates, Event Hubs)
- Expertise in build and deployment tools - (Visual Studio, Git/Bitbucket, Maven, Jenkins, Nexus, SQL Management Studio, Nunit, Ajax)
- Expertise in developing distributed computing (MS HPC, Sagemaker, Spark)
- Eight years of experience with integration and service frameworks (e.g. API Gateways, Apache Camel, Swagger API, Zookeeper, Kafka, messaging tools, microservices)
- Expertise with Microservices and REST based API development (e.g. Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Entity Framework, IIS, Swagger, Odata, .NET API 2, .NET API Core, AutoMapper)
- Experience leveraging continuous integration/development tools (e.g. Jenkins, Docker, Containers, OpenShift, Kubernetes, and container automation) in a Ci/CD pipeline
- Familiarity with modern frontend development frameworks (Angular, React, Vue.js, ASP.NET MVC, HTTP, HTML, JS, CSS, Ajax)
- Advanced understanding of software development and research tools
- Attention to detail and results oriented, with a strong customer focus
- Ability to work as part of a team and independently
- Analytical and problem-solving skills
- Technical communication skills and the ability to present information to all levels of the organization
- Problem-solving and technical communication skills
- Ability to prioritize workload to meet tight deadlines
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with TypeScript/React, Node.js, and APIs
- Knowledge of AI-Assisted Engineering
- Knowledge of the financial services industry
- Experience with enterprise modernization.
- Experience raising the engineering and operational standards.
- Experience coaching engineers in a Scaled Agile environment
- Experience with analytics, ML, or streaming architectures.
- Financial services knowledge.
- Experience with Six Sigma is a plus.
Working Conditions:
- Hybrid - Office Environment (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays)
- Work outside of normal business hours may be required
- Moderate Travel 10 to 25%
This job description is not a contract of employment nor for any specific job responsibilities. The Company may change, add to, remove, or revoke the terms of this job description at its discretion. Managers may assign other duties and responsibilities as needed. In the event an employee or applicant requests or requires an accommodation to perform job functions, the applicable HR Business Partner should be contacted to evaluate the accommodation request.
Compensation:
The Salary for this position generally ranges between$170,000- $205,000 annually.Please note that the salary range is a good faith estimate for this position and actual starting pay is determined by several factors includingqualifications, experience, geography, work location designation (in-office, hybrid, remote) and operational needs. Salary may vary above and below the stated amounts, as permitted by applicable law.
Additionally, this position is typically eligible for an Annual Bonus based on the Company Bonus Plan/Individual Performance and is at the Companys discretion.
Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
This is a hybrid position requiring three days in office per week in one of our hub locations (Philadelphia, PA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Denver, CO). Relocation assistance will not be provided for this position.
What We Offer
For eligible employees, we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support both the personal and financial well-being of our employees.
Compensation Benefits
Benefits Package
