Principal - Software Engineer

Ally and Your Career Ally Financial only succeeds when its people do - and that’s more than some cliché people put on job postings. We love this stuff! We see our people as, well, people - with interests, families, friends, dreams, and causes that are all important to them. Our focus is on the health and safety of our teammates as well as work-life balance and diversity and inclusion. From generous benefits to a variety of employee resource groups, we strive to build paths that encourage employees to stretch themselves professionally. We want to help you grow, develop, and learn new things. You’re constantly evolving, so shouldn’t your opportunities be, too? Work Schedule : Ally designates roles as (1) fully on-site, (2) hybrid, or (3) fully remote. Hybrid roles are generally expected to be in the office a certain number of days per week as indicated by your manager. Your hiring manager will discuss this role's specific work requirements with you during the hiring process. All work requirements are subject to change at any time based on leader discretion and/or business need. The Opportunity The Principal Software Engineer owns the reliability, architecture and modernization of the middleware and cloud platforms that run Ally's consumer-servicing applications. The role spans the full estate: the enterprise middleware platforms in production today (Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, Oracle SOA/OSB, IBM MQ/ActiveMQ) and the cloud-native target state (Kubernetes/Red Hat OpenShift and AWS, provisioned with Infrastructure-as-Code and delivered through GitLab CI/CD). The engineer sets Site Reliability Engineering standards (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity plans), serves as the Level 3 technical authority for production incidents, platform migrations from on-premises middleware to cloud-native platforms, and introduces automation — including AI-assisted operations — that reduces manual effort and unplanned outages. All work is performed under financial-services change, audit and security controls. The Work Itself Key responsibilities • Architect, build and operate the middleware and cloud platforms supporting consumer-servicing applications, including Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, Apache/NGINX, Oracle SOA Suite / Oracle Service Bus, and IBM MQ / ActiveMQ messaging. • Migration and modernization of on-premises middleware workloads to Kubernetes / Red Hat OpenShift and AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch), including capacity sizing, cut-over planning and rollback design. • Define and implement Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Jenkins) with embedded security scanning, deployment automation and environment consistency across development, test, staging and production. • Establish Site Reliability Engineering standards: service-level indicators and objectives, error budgets, capacity forecasting, availability engineering and performance baselines; instrument platforms with Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Dynatrace or AppDynamics. • Serve as Level 3 technical authority for production incidents and problem management: lead root-cause analysis, implement preventive measures, and drive reduction of recurring incidents and unplanned outages. • Platform security and governance controls: SSL/TLS certificate lifecycle, LDAP/directory integration, F5 BIG-IP load balancing, firewall and port management, patch management and end-of-life remediation, with evidence that satisfies internal audit and regulatory examinations. • Execute Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management in ServiceNow in compliance with SLA, governance and regulatory requirements. • Design and implement AI-assisted operational automation (incident analysis, vulnerability remediation, runbook and documentation generation, knowledge management) and evaluate new AIOps capabilities for adoption. • Work on technical assessments, feasibility studies and architecture reviews for strategic initiatives; produce system design documents, build guides, runbooks and operational standards. • Guide engineers across SRE, DevSecOps and Release Management; coordinate with application, security, infrastructure and vendor teams, including offshore support. Minimum qualifications (required) Education • Bachelor's degree, or foreign academic equivalent, in Computer Science, Computer Applications, Information Systems, Information Technology, or a closely related field. • A Master's degree in one of the fields above with 5 years of experience is preferred. Experience • 7 years of progressive, post-degree experience in software, middleware, platform or infrastructure engineering, which must include: • 5 years architecting, building and administering enterprise middleware platforms — at least two of Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, Oracle SOA Suite / Oracle Service Bus, IBM MQ or ActiveMQ — including clustering, high availability, SSL/TLS, LDAP integration, performance tuning and capacity planning; • 2 years engineering cloud or container platforms — public cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP) and/or Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift or Docker — using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, Puppet or Chef) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins or GitLab); • 3 years providing Level 2/3 production support for mission-critical, customer-facing applications, including incident, problem and change management, root-cause analysis and preventive remediation under SLA commitments. • Experience in the sub-areas above may be gained concurrently. • Demonstrated experience leading platform migrations, upgrades or modernization initiatives in an enterprise environment (telecommunications, financial services, government or comparable scale). Required Technical skills 1. Enterprise middleware architecture and administration - Architect-level on at least two of Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, Oracle SOA Suite / OSB, IBM MQ, ActiveMQ; Apache HTTP Server, NGINX or Tomcat; environment build from the ground up, c