Responsibilities
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
- Function Lead from both technical and delivery perspective with focus more on project and resource management
- Ability to effectively influence, direct and monitor the project work
- Uses established relationships in effective collaboration with other levels, within team, within business area and across business areas.
- Develop strong understanding of the business
- Develop and Support decision making , good Business communication skills across multiple levels
- Ability to successfully manage and take accountability for projects including identifying necessary resources, communicating and establishing and meeting deadlines.
- Ability to effectively resolve conflicts
- Good Understanding on development frameworks and standard procedures followed within the organization
- Ensure alignment to business strategies
- Challenges ideas, methods, guidelines and procedures to promote discussion and thinking
- Supports and develops strategic thinking / drives
- Act as a point of escalation and resolution during the project lifecycle
- Supports in performance evaluations and mentors team members through formal (Data, Reports etc..) and informal channels
- Strong capability of executing project /operations in terms of deliveries, managing risks, ensuring overall quality
- Adheres and ensures that the Team adheres to the standard process and procedures set in place for execution
- Consistently raises the bar by going beyond day-to-day performance expectations
- Develop planning/organizational, problem-solving, analytical, time management, and decision making skills
Qualifications
Who You are:
Lead Software Engineer (AWS & Microservices) to design and deliver
scalable, loosely coupled, cloud-native systems. Strong focus on
microservices architecture, AWS cloud adoption, technical leadership, and high-quality delivery, along with
mentorship and effective stakeholder communication.
Experience: 7 to 9 years
Education: Graduate - Bachelors degree (Engineering)
Microservices Architecture & Cloud Design
- Design and evolve microservices-based architectures (domain-driven, event-driven).
- Collaborate with architects to define service boundaries, APIs, and data ownership.
- Select and implement AWS-native services and patterns (serverless vs. containers) for scalability, resilience, security, and cost optimization.
Build & Delivery
- Develop Java/Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs.
- Implement API lifecycle management (versioning, backward compatibility, deprecation).
- Ensure operational readiness, reliability, and adherence to non-functional requirements (NFRs).
Quality & Reliability
- Define and enforce test strategies (unit, integration, contract, performance).
- Implement resilience patterns (circuit breaker, retries, bulkhead) and caching strategies.
- Ensure strong CI/CD quality gates and automation.
Security & Compliance
- Implement secure APIs using OAuth2, JWT, IAM best practices.
- Manage secrets, encryption, and compliance with enterprise policies.
Observability & Cost Optimization
- Establish end-to-end observability (logs, metrics, traces).
- Implement alerting, dashboards, and SLO tracking.
- Design for auto-scaling, right-sizing, and cost-efficient architectures.
Mentorship & Collaboration
- Mentor engineers on microservices, AWS best practices, and design patterns.
- Communicate trade-offs, risks, and technical decisions to stakeholders.
- Drive engineering excellence and continuous improvement.
Agile Execution
- Facilitate agile ceremonies with a strong focus on technical outcomes and delivery predictability.
- Break down stories into clear, testable technical tasks with defined DoR/DoD.
Must Have Skills
Java & Microservices – Advanced
- Java (8+): OOP, SOLID, Streams, functional programming, concurrency.
- Microservices: Service decomposition, inter-service communication (REST, messaging), API gateway patterns.
- Frameworks: Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Spring Batch.
- API Design: REST standards (idempotency, pagination, error handling), OpenAPI/Swagger.
- Event-Driven Architecture: Kafka/SQS/SNS, asynchronous processing.
- Design Patterns: Factory, Builder, Strategy, Circuit Breaker, Saga.
- Data & Testing: Strong SQL, NoSQL basics, JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers, contract testing.
- Tooling: Maven/Gradle, Git, CI/CD, observability (OpenTelemetry).
AWS – Intermediate to Advanced
- Core Services: Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, EventBridge, SQS/SNS, ECS/Fargate.
- Microservices Enablement: Service discovery, API Gateway, event routing.
- Monitoring & Governance: CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail.
- Security: IAM (least privilege), KMS, Secrets Manager, VPC design.
- Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK / Terraform / CloudFormation.
- Deployment Strategies: Blue/green, canary, zero-downtime deployments.
- Reliability & Cost: Auto scaling, retries, DLQs, throttling, cost optimization strategies.
Soft Skills
- Strong problem-solving and analytical mindset.
- Effective communication across teams and stakeholders.
- Proven mentorship and leadership ability.
- High ownership and accountability mindset.
- Ability to identify ambiguity, mitigate risks, and drive clarity.
Additional Information
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!
