Principal Engineer, Technology

Job Description Summary Highly specialized expert developing software applications, in entirety or in part, that have a big impact on business for a large organization. Job Description This position will follow our hybrid work model, we expect the selected candidate to be in office 3 days a week at one of the following office locations: St. Petersburg, FL; Summary: As part of the Wealth Management technology team, the Principal Engineer will own and lead the technical architecture and development of our on-premises and cloud applications and data platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: the Principal Engineer sets technical direction, writes code alongside the team, leads proofs of concept (POCs) to validate new technologies and approaches, and mentors senior and junior engineers. As a Fortune 500 company, we offer the opportunity to shape enterprise-scale solutions in a collaborative and encouraging environment. The core team is based out of our headquarters in St. Petersburg, FL (Hybrid). We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer with strong technical leadership, analytical, and problem-solving skills. The candidate should be able to operate effectively in a fast-paced enterprise technology environment and support both strategic development initiatives and ongoing production stability. The ideal candidate is a passionate, hands-on technologist who leads by example and exhibits excellent English written and oral communication skills, allowing them to clearly convey complex technical concepts, architectural decisions, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences. Responsibilities: • Own and lead the end-to-end technical architecture, design, and development of scalable, highly available, and secure solutions across on-premises and external cloud environments. • Stay hands-on in coding and development: write high-quality, production-ready code alongside the team, conduct code and design reviews, and establish engineering standards and best practices. • Lead POCs and prototypes with the team to validate new technologies and design approaches, and turn successful outcomes into reusable solution patterns and reference architectures. • Develop a deep understanding of end-to-end data, application, and service requirements, and translate them into solution designs and technical roadmaps that support strategic development initiatives. • Architect and build cloud-native microservices and REST APIs, Kafka-based event-driven systems, and scalable ETL/ELT data pipelines using Spark and AWS data services. • Design, engineer, and build core platform capabilities, including networking, security, logging, monitoring, and persistent storage. • Ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements for scalability, resiliency, security, performance, high availability, and disaster recovery, and proactively plan capacity, monitoring, and scaling of platforms and applications. • Support ongoing production stability by leading the resolution of complex production issues, performing root cause analysis, and driving long-term fixes and observability improvements. • Research, evaluate, and recommend innovative technologies, tools, and frameworks for private and public cloud environments, weighing cost, performance, and security while adhering to technical and budgetary constraints. • Drive CI/CD, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) practices to improve delivery speed, quality, and consistency. • Provide technical direction and mentorship to senior and junior engineers, fostering a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning. • Lead technical planning and execution within the Agile or Waterfall development lifecycle, including daily stand-ups, biweekly sprint planning, estimation, and design reviews. • Collaborate with business partners, product owners, technology teams, vendors, and support teams to align on requirements, priorities, and solutions, and communicate across departments to solve problems. • Occasionally work a non-standard shift including nights and/or weekends and/or have on-call responsibilities. • Performs other duties and responsibilities as assigned. Required Skills: • Proven track record of owning and leading technical architecture and hands-on development for enterprise-scale systems, including leading POCs and guiding solutions from concept to production. • Strong experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, ORM/Hibernate, and distributed systems. • Experience with Python programming. • Strong experience with AWS services such as EKS, MSK, S3, EMR, Redshift, Glue, MWAA/Airflow, IAM, and CloudWatch. • Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native architecture, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform. • Experience with Apache Kafka/Confluent Kafka and event-driven architectures. • Experience building scalable data pipelines, ETL/ELT solutions, Spark-based processing, and distributed data platforms. • Experience with Oracle, Redshift, SQL, or similar database platforms. • Strong understanding of application scalability, resiliency, security, performance, high availability, and disaster recovery. • Experience with CI/CD and DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Git, Azure DevOps/TFS, and SonarQube. • Experience with Monitoring and APM tools such as Datadog, Dynatrace, CloudWatch, and Splunk. • Ability to provide technical direction and mentor senior and junior engineers. • Experience in financial services or large-scale enterprise technology environments is preferred. • Strong communication skills with the ability to work effectively with business partners, product owners, technology teams, vendors, and support teams. • Experience using AI-assisted productivity tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or similar tools for documentation, analysis, and development. Ability to: • Identify and understand complex technical issues, problems, and opportunities; compare data from different sources to d