Lead Specialty Software Engineer - Capital Markets Reference Data

Wells Fargo & Company•Charlotte, NC

About The Position

About this role: Wells Fargo is seeking a Lead Specialty Software Engineer to join our Corporate and Investment Banking Technology team. This strategic role centers on modernizing and expanding our Reference Data Platform, a critical application supporting Capital Markets business & trading. You will lead the architecture, design, and development of high-performance systems for ingesting, mastering, and distributing financial instruments reference data - requiring deep hands-on expertise in scalable data processing and distributed systems. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in distributed systems development, accelerated delivery leveraging agentic AI tools, and a proven ability to lead initiatives while ensuring operational excellence, risk management, and regulatory compliance. In this role, you will: Lead complex initiatives on selected domains, delivering scalable and resilient solutions. Accelerate development velocity by leveraging agentic AI tools across the team's engineering workflows. Champion data quality and governance practices including golden-source determination, cross-vendor reconciliation, and data lineage tracking across the reference data platform. Ensure systems are monitored to increase operational efficiency and managed to mitigate risk. Define opportunities to maximize resource utilization and improve processes while reducing cost. Lead, design, develop, test and implement applications and system components, tools and utilities, models, simulation, and analytics to manage complex business functions using sophisticated technologies. Resolve coding, testing and escalated platform issues of a technically challenging nature. Lead team to ensure compliance and risk management requirements for supported area are met and work with other stakeholders to implement key risk initiatives. Mentor less experienced software engineers. Collaborate and influence all levels of professionals including managers.

Requirements

5+ years of Specialty Software Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
5+ years designing and implementing distributed systems using Java with expertise in memory management, concurrency, JMS, and native I/O
3+ years of Java 17+, including modern features like Streams API, records, and enhanced concurrency
3+ years of implementing microservices, preferably using Spring ecosystem (Boot, Batch and/or Data)
3+ years of SQL experience including complex query optimization
2+ years of experience building event-driven architectures using Kafka, Solace, etc.

Nice To Haves

Experience building cloud-ready solutions with Azure, GCP or OpenShift.
Experience developing data APIs exposed via API gateways
Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Harness, GitHub Actions, or similar) and automated testing frameworks (JUnit, Mockito)
Demonstrated knowledge of LLMs, prompt engineering techniques, context engineering, and spec-driven development
Domain expertise in Financial Instrument Reference Data including integration with market data vendors
Proven track record in developing low-latency, high-reliability applications for financial services or trading platforms
Experience using distributed caching technologies (Apache Ignite, Redis, Coherence)
Experience with Python (pandas, PySpark, or similar) for data transformation, enrichment, and data mastering workflows
Experience implementing rule-based data mastering systems
Front-end development experience with React
Well versed in Agile development strategies and ceremonies, Test Driven Development & DevOps practices
Strong foundation in object-oriented analysis and design, algorithms, and data structures
Excellent analytical and communication skills

Responsibilities

Lead complex initiatives on selected domains, delivering scalable and resilient solutions.
Accelerate development velocity by leveraging agentic AI tools across the team's engineering workflows.
Champion data quality and governance practices including golden-source determination, cross-vendor reconciliation, and data lineage tracking across the reference data platform.
Ensure systems are monitored to increase operational efficiency and managed to mitigate risk.
Define opportunities to maximize resource utilization and improve processes while reducing cost.
Lead, design, develop, test and implement applications and system components, tools and utilities, models, simulation, and analytics to manage complex business functions using sophisticated technologies.
Resolve coding, testing and escalated platform issues of a technically challenging nature.
Lead team to ensure compliance and risk management requirements for supported area are met and work with other stakeholders to implement key risk initiatives.
Mentor less experienced software engineers.
Collaborate and influence all levels of professionals including managers.
Develop and deliver software for Reference Data platform components as a hands-on individual contributor
Collaborate with Product Owners and business users to translate requirements into functional and technical specifications
Analyze and refactor legacy systems to align with a scalable microservice architecture
Design and document current-state and target-state architectures for platform modernization initiatives
Write high-quality, performant Java code applying object-oriented principles and proven design patterns
Conduct thorough unit and functional testing; document all development activities per team standards
Ensure quality, maintainability, and extensibility of supported systems and risk applications
Build resilient applications requiring near zero production support
Ramp quickly on new business domains within Capital Markets technology
Leverage agentic AI tools to accelerate delivery and maintain high code quality
Identify opportunities to improve engineering processes and propose solutions using AI technologies