IT Systems Engineer Sr.

First Horizon•Raleigh, NC

1d•Onsite

About The Position

In this role as a senior tech lead, you will lead solution architecture and operations for First Horizon’s Entitlements Engine and Third-Party Integrations & Open Finance portfolio. You’ll define technical patterns, drive delivery across multiple projects, and lead operational excellence for secure, high-availability client-facing APIs in a regulated environment, mentoring associates and partnering across product, security, risk, and vendors. You will also help establish lightweight guardrails for responsible AI use for the team and ensure alignment with the enterprise; Pilot targeted AI-assisted capabilities to create new client and developer experiences and to accelerate issue resolution (including use of MCP concepts where appropriate).

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering with 3–5+ years as a lead/architect for cloud-native APIs/integrations in regulated environments.
7+ years of direct experience in the banking/financial services industry, applying regulatory, data privacy, and risk/control requirements to client-facing APIs and integrations.
Proven expertise in designing, building, and operating secure, scalable APIs and integrations on Microsoft Azure.
Hands-on proficiency in at least one of Java (Spring Boot), Python (FastAPI/Flask), or JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js/Express); comfortable reviewing code across multiple stacks.
API governance: OpenAPI, versioning/deprecation, idempotency, retries/backoff, correlation IDs.
Identity/security: OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS; RBAC/ABAC; secrets and certificate lifecycle management.
DevOps: Git, CI/CD, containers (Docker/Helm), IaC (Terraform/Bicep), automated testing and quality gates.
SRE/operations: on-call leadership, incident management, SLIs/SLOs, performance/capacity, DR/BCP, change management.
Integration patterns: REST, events/webhooks, async messaging, and secure file exchange.
Excellent communication and stakeholder/vendor management; Bachelor’s in CS/IT or equivalent experience.
Interest in pragmatic, responsible use of AI-assisted tools to improve developer experience and operations in a regulated environment

Nice To Haves

Financial services/open banking; OFX/FDX; payments (ACH, RTP, ISO 20022).
Entitlements/authorization depth; policy as code (OPA/Rego), SoD controls and audit trails.
Advanced testing (contract, performance, security) and chaos engineering.
Developer experience tooling and progressive delivery; feature flags and developer portals.
FinOps experience; relevant Azure/DevOps/security certifications.
Familiarity with modern AI tooling (e.g., Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot) for documentation, testing, or operations.
Awareness of MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar tool-mediation concepts to safely expose least-privileged actions to AI agents—helpful but not required.
Exposure to AIOps concepts (e.g., alert summarization, anomaly detection, guided runbooks) is a plus.

Responsibilities

Own solution architecture across the Entitlements Engine and all third-party integrations.
Set API-first standards and integration patterns; govern API lifecycle and consumer onboarding.
Lead identity/authorization (Microsoft Entra ID, OAuth/OIDC, mTLS, RBAC/ABAC) with strong auditability.
Drive delivery across multiple projects; partner with product to plan, prioritize, and remove blockers.
Lead operations/SRE: define SLIs/SLOs, act as incident commander, run post-incident reviews, and guide DR/BCP, capacity, and FinOps.
Establish observability (Dynatrace, Azure Monitor/App Insights), performance tuning, and actionable dashboards/alerts.
Standardize CI/CD and IaC (Azure DevOps/GitHub, Terraform/Bicep); enable modern releases (blue/green, canary, feature flags).
Manage partner onboarding/changes and safe deprecations/protocol updates; ensure secure, reliable connectivity.
Mentor associates, lead design/code reviews, and communicate risks/decisions clearly to stakeholders.
Pilot a small number of AI-assisted improvements—such as conversational API documentation/Q&A, incident summarization, or log triage—with appropriate controls, auditability.