Sr Principal, Software Engineer

Sits within a newly acquired startup building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions within the banking group.

The role builds, operates, and scales the services at the heart of the platform — spanning Core Banking, workflows, and compliance. These systems define financial products, manage accounts, execute and record money movement, orchestrate banking processes, and enforce regulatory rules at Tier-1 scale.

Requires deep experience with complex distributed systems, a correctness-first mindset, sound engineering judgement, and full end-to-end ownership from design through production operation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build and evolve the capabilities that bring modern banking products to life — from products and accounts through transactions, transfers, journals, balances, and interest, to durable workflows and compliance controls.


• Define reliable APIs, events, and data contracts that connect these capabilities into a coherent, auditable banking platform.

Production Ownership

• Own services throughout their lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.


• Participate in on-call and incident response, diagnosing failures across distributed services, data infrastructure, and event-driven workflows.


• Establish effective observability, alerting, operational controls, and recovery procedures; learn from production incidents to improve reliability, performance, and operational maturity.

Architecture and Delivery

• Design systems for correctness, auditability, scalability, and resilience at Tier-1 banking scale, making pragmatic trade-offs between delivery speed, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability.


• Improve engineering practices across automated testing, CI/CD, safe deployment, rollback, and recovery.


• Use AI-assisted engineering, MCP servers, agent workflows, and automated runbooks where they materially improve engineering or operational outcomes.


• Contribute to team excellence through knowledge sharing, mentoring, and coaching, helping to develop technical capability and promote engineering best practices across the organization

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE & CAPABILITIES

• Deep experience designing and building complex distributed systems at scale, using a strongly typed, compiled language. Go is preferred, but deep experience with a comparable language is welcome.


• Experience with event-driven architectures and technologies such as Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms.


• Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, invariants, idempotency, failure modes, and distributed-system trade-offs.

Production Experience

• Substantial experience operating and debugging critical systems in production, ideally including on-call and incident response across application, data, and infrastructure boundaries.


• Practical experience with observability, reliability engineering, capacity planning, deployment safety, and disaster recovery.


• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, GitOps, and modern production-engineering practices.

Judgement and Communication

• Practical judgement and common sense, with the ability to evaluate and clearly articulate architectural trade-offs rather than apply technologies or patterns mechanically.


• Ability to explain complex systems in simple, precise terms and work effectively across coding, architecture, operations, and cross-team delivery.


• Effective use of AI to amplify genuine engineering expertise, with human ownership of design, validation, security, and production outcomes.

IMPACT & SCOPE

• Direct impact on core banking capabilities shipped to and supported in production for Tier-1 global institutions.


• High autonomy and accountability within a small, senior team.


• Ownership of mission-critical systems operating at enterprise scale.

WHY THIS ROLE

This role offers the autonomy, ownership, and technical depth of a startup, combined with the scale, stability, and long-term impact of FIS. Engineers in this role shape foundational banking infrastructure while operating with clear accountability, enterprise resources, and real-world production responsibility.