Software Engineer Principal

Job Description

Sits within a newly acquired startup building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions within the banking group. The team is small and senior, with high autonomy and accountability, and an engineer owns services through the whole life cycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation and continuous improvement. That includes on-call and incident response.


This is not a remote or hybrid role, the team works in person every day in our NYC office.

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

Banking Platform Engineering

• 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

Engineering Depth

• 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.

FIS is committed to providing its employees with an exciting career opportunity and competitive compensation. The pay range for this full-time position is $206,000.00 - $350,200.00 and reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for this position based on the posted role, level, and location. Within the range, actual individual starting pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Any changes in work location will also impact actual individual starting pay. Please consult with your recruiter about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
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EEOC Statement

FIS is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, genetic information, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. The EEO is the Law poster is available here supplement document available here

For positions located in the US, the following conditions apply. If you are made a conditional offer of employment, you will be required to undergo a drug test. ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Sourcing Model

Recruitment at FIS works primarily on a direct sourcing model; a relatively small portion of our hiring is through recruitment agencies. FIS does not accept resumes from recruitment agencies which are not on the preferred supplier list and is not responsible for any related fees for resumes submitted to job postings, our employees, or any other part of our company.

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