Principal Engineer, TechnologyRaymond James Financial, Inc.

This position will follow our hybrid work model, we expect the selected candidate to be in office 3 days a week at one of the following office locations: St. Petersburg, FL;

Summary:

As part of the Wealth Management technology team, the Principal Engineer will own and lead the technical architecture and development of our on-premises and cloud applications and data platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: the Principal Engineer sets technical direction, writes code alongside the team, leads proofs of concept (POCs) to validate new technologies and approaches, and mentors senior and junior engineers. As a Fortune 500 company, we offer the opportunity to shape enterprise-scale solutions in a collaborative and encouraging environment. The core team is based out of our headquarters in St. Petersburg, FL (Hybrid).

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer with strong technical leadership, analytical, and problem-solving skills. The candidate should be able to operate effectively in a fast-paced enterprise technology environment and support both strategic development initiatives and ongoing production stability. The ideal candidate is a passionate, hands-on technologist who leads by example and exhibits excellent English written and oral communication skills, allowing them to clearly convey complex technical concepts, architectural decisions, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities:

• Own and lead the end-to-end technical architecture, design, and development of scalable, highly available, and secure solutions across on-premises and external cloud environments.

• Stay hands-on in coding and development: write high-quality, production-ready code alongside the team, conduct code and design reviews, and establish engineering standards and best practices.

• Lead POCs and prototypes with the team to validate new technologies and design approaches, and turn successful outcomes into reusable solution patterns and reference architectures.

• Develop a deep understanding of end-to-end data, application, and service requirements, and translate them into solution designs and technical roadmaps that support strategic development initiatives.

• Architect and build cloud-native microservices and REST APIs, Kafka-based event-driven systems, and scalable ETL/ELT data pipelines using Spark and AWS data services.

• Design, engineer, and build core platform capabilities, including networking, security, logging, monitoring, and persistent storage.

• Ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements for scalability, resiliency, security, performance, high availability, and disaster recovery, and proactively plan capacity, monitoring, and scaling of platforms and applications.

• Support ongoing production stability by leading the resolution of complex production issues, performing root cause analysis, and driving long-term fixes and observability improvements.

• Research, evaluate, and recommend innovative technologies, tools, and frameworks for private and public cloud environments, weighing cost, performance, and security while adhering to technical and budgetary constraints.

• Drive CI/CD, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) practices to improve delivery speed, quality, and consistency.

• Provide technical direction and mentorship to senior and junior engineers, fostering a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.

• Lead technical planning and execution within the Agile or Waterfall development lifecycle, including daily stand-ups, biweekly sprint planning, estimation, and design reviews.

• Collaborate with business partners, product owners, technology teams, vendors, and support teams to align on requirements, priorities, and solutions, and communicate across departments to solve problems.

• Occasionally work a non-standard shift including nights and/or weekends and/or have on-call responsibilities.

• Performs other duties and responsibilities as assigned.

Required Skills:

• Proven track record of owning and leading technical architecture and hands-on development for enterprise-scale systems, including leading POCs and guiding solutions from concept to production.

• Strong experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, ORM/Hibernate, and distributed systems.

• Experience with Python programming.

• Strong experience with AWS services such as EKS, MSK, S3, EMR, Redshift, Glue, MWAA/Airflow, IAM, and CloudWatch.

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native architecture, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.

• Experience with Apache Kafka/Confluent Kafka and event-driven architectures.

• Experience building scalable data pipelines, ETL/ELT solutions, Spark-based processing, and distributed data platforms.

• Experience with Oracle, Redshift, SQL, or similar database platforms.

• Strong understanding of application scalability, resiliency, security, performance, high availability, and disaster recovery.

• Experience with CI/CD and DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Git, Azure DevOps/TFS, and SonarQube.

• Experience with Monitoring and APM tools such as Datadog, Dynatrace, CloudWatch, and Splunk.

• Ability to provide technical direction and mentor senior and junior engineers.

• Experience in financial services or large-scale enterprise technology environments is preferred.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to work effectively with business partners, product owners, technology teams, vendors, and support teams.

• Experience using AI-assisted productivity tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or similar tools for documentation, analysis, and development.

Ability to:

• Identify and understand complex technical issues, problems, and opportunities; compare data from different sources to draw conclusions.

• Clearly convey complex technical information and ideas through a variety of media to individuals or groups, from engineering teams to senior leadership, in a manner that engages the audience and helps them understand and retain the message.

• Use effective approaches for choosing a course of action or developing appropriate solutions; recommend or take action that is consistent with available facts, constraints, and probable consequences.

• Balance long-term architectural goals with near-term delivery commitments and production support needs.

• Influence technical direction and build consensus across teams, often without direct authority.

• Demonstrate an expert level of technical and professional skill or knowledge in position-related areas; remain current with developments and trends in areas of expertise.

• Develop and use collaborative relationships to facilitate the accomplishment of work goals.

• Make internal and external clients and their needs a primary focus of actions; develop and sustain productive client relationships.

• Occasionally work a non-standard shift including nights and/or weekends and/or have on-call responsibilities.