Lead Software Engineer

What You'll do

As a Lead Software Engineer at Principal Financial Group, you will be at the forefront of crafting innovative and high-performance software solutions. Your role will involve crafting, developing, and implementing software that drives our products. You will work in close collaboration with our product development team to understand user needs and translate them into flawless technical specifications. Ensuring our software products are scalable, reliable, and efficient will be key to your success.

You'll have opportunity to

• Architecture & Cloud Design: Collaborate with architects to define service/data architectures, select AWS services/patterns (serverless vs. containers) for scale, resilience, security, and cost.
• Build & Delivery: Implement Java/Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs, manage API lifecycle (versioning/deprecation), ensure operational readiness and NFRs
• Quality & Reliability: Establish test strategy (unit/integration/contract/performance), implement resilience patterns and caching, enforce CI quality gates.
• Security & Compliance: Implement OAuth2/JWT, secrets management, encryption, align to org policy and regulatory standards.
• Observability & Cost: Implement logs/metrics/traces, alerts, dashboards, design for right-sizing, autoscaling, and cost efficiency.
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentor engineers, communicate options/trade-offs/risks clearly with Product and Architecture.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies : (stand‑ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, demos, retros) with a focus on technical outcomes, risk surfacing, and sprint goal clarity.
• Refine stories into actionable technical tasks: ensure Definition of Ready/Done, unambiguous acceptance criteria, testability, and accurate story point estimation.

Who You are

We are looking for talented experienced Lead software engineer with expertise in AWS cloud services, Typescript and Java development for our engineering team.

Experience: 6 to 8 years

Education

Bachelor’s(Engineering)/Master’s in computer science or a related field.

Must Have

Java - Advanced

• Java / Java 8+: OOP & SOLID, Streams, Optional, functional interfaces, lambda expressions.
• Concurrency: Thread pools, Future/CompletableFuture, synchronization, locks, concurrent collections, Java Memory Model, heap/stack, GC insights.
• Web & API: RESTful design (idempotency, pagination, error models), rate limiting, API gateway concepts, Swagger/OpenAPI.
• Spring:Spring Core (IoC/DI), Spring MVC, Spring Boot (auto‑config/starter deps), Spring Security (JWT/OAuth2), Spring Batch, Spring AOP.
• Architecture & Patterns:Event‑driven design (MQ/queueing), patterns—Factory, Builder, Strategy, Template.
• Data & Testing: Strong SQL, , JUnit 5/Mockito/Testcontainers, contract & performance testing.
• Tooling & Observability: Maven/Gradle, Git, CI/CD, logs/metrics/traces (OpenTelemetry).

AWS - Intermediate

• Core:Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, EventBridge, SQS/SNS, ECS/Fargate, monitoring with CloudWatch/X-Ray, auditing with CloudTrail.
• Security & Networking:IAM (least privilege), KMS, VPC (subnets, SGs/NACLs), Secrets Manager/Parameter Store, basic WAF.
• IaC & Deployments:AWS CDK (TypeScript preferred) or Terraform/CloudFormation, blue/green, canary, feature flags, zero-downtime deployments.
• Reliability & Cost: Autoscaling, throttling, DLQs, retries/backoff, cost-aware designs (right-sizing, storage tiers, DynamoDB capacity models).

Soft Skills

• Strong problem-solving, analytical thinking, and bias for action.
• Plans, prioritizes, and communicates effectively across teams and time zones.
• Mentors teammates.
• Demonstrates ownership, raises the bar, and consistently exceeds day-to-day expectations.
• Identifies ambiguity/risks and proactively drives clarity and resolution with stakeholders.

Our Engineering Culture

In our Agile/Lean DevOps environment, we've nurtured a culture of innovation and experimentation across our development teams. As a customer-focused organization, we collaborate closely with our end users and product owners to understand and rapidly respond to emerging business needs. Collaboration is ingrained into every aspect of our work – from the products we develop to the world-class service we offer. We are motivated by the belief that diversity of thought, background, and perspective is crucial to crafting the finest products and experiences for our customers. Come join us and become a part of a highly ambitious team dedicated to delivering impeccable solutions!