Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them. Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself. A Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for architecting and implementing complex software solutions, driving technical excellence, and providing guidance on major engineering projects. They play a crucial role in shaping the technical roadmap and strategy of the organization. A Principal Software Engineer is an individual contributor focusing on the significant engineering ownership of complex applications including design and development of new features, improvements to existing code, code release and deployment and maintenance of the applications. What will you do: - Provide technical feasibility and evaluation of the product based on business needs. - Provide technical leadership to the team in design finalization, code reviews, and resolving production support and maintenance issues. - Lead design and implementation of critical software components and systems. - Mentor technical members of the team. - Contribute to the development of coding standards, best practices, and guidelines - Collaborate with stakeholders to define and execute the technical roadmap. - Stay informed about emerging technologies and industry trends to drive technical innovation. - Hands-on role which involves coding on day-to-day basis. - Lead domain modelling designs. - Responsible for production on-call duties like any other team member. - Produce high quality design documentation. - Develop event-driven architectures and streaming pipelines for high-volume data ingestion and processing. - Implement stream processing using Kafka. - Ensure data reliability, fault tolerance, and exactly-once/at-least-once semantics. Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Kafka performance, latency, and throughput. What will you bring: - 10+ years of expertise in Java, Spring boot microservices and Cloud Native technologies or similar (including 2+ years in a lead or principal capacity). - Designed, developed, and maintained a complex software solution involving multiple stakeholders. - Proficient in AWS/EKS and SQL/NOSQL platforms. - Preferred knowledge of service mesh technologies like Istio/Envoy. - Deep knowledge and understanding of Cloud based development tools and processes. - Proven experience in designing critical applications that interact with several other systems internally and externally. - Develop event-driven architectures and streaming pipelines for high-volume data ingestion and processing. - Implement stream processing using Kafka. - Ensure data reliability, fault tolerance, and exactly-once/at-least-once semantics. - Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Kafka performance, latency, and throughput. - Deep knowledge and understanding of software development process in a distributed multi geography team environment. - Good hands-on experience in domain driven modeling and API development. - Good working knowledge of SRE practices and responsibilities. - Excellent problem-solving and communication skills including written and oral. - Proven team player who can mentor other technical members of the team. What will set you apart: - Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field. - Architecture level cloud or product certifications. This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job. The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time. You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description. You may be required to perform other duties that are not included in this job description. The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason. We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.