Principal Engineer

Wells Fargo•Iselin, NJ

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Wells Fargo is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as a hands‑on technical authority within the Prime Brokerage and Equity Finance & Futures (EF&F) Technology organization. This role is responsible for shaping and delivering next‑generation Prime Services trade processing and clearing platforms, with a focus on high‑throughput Market Maker Clearing, financing workflows, and end‑to‑end lifecycle automation. The successful candidate will provide engineering leadership through direct contribution, owning system architecture, critical design decisions, and delivery of scalable, resilient, and secure microservices and platform frameworks operating at enterprise scale. Deep expertise in Java, server‑side architecture, and distributed systems design is required. This role demands strong technical judgment and accountability for platform quality, performance, resiliency, security, risk controls, and regulatory compliance across supported applications. The Principal Engineer will actively engage in complex production issue resolution, lead design and code reviews, drive engineering standards, and influence continuous improvement in testing automation, SDLC practices, and platform modernization. Candidates must bring experience building front‑to‑back systems for Sales & Trading, Prime Brokerage, or Prime Financing, with the ability to clearly communicate complex margin, financing, and risk workflows to senior technology and business leadership. Exceptional communication skills and the ability to translate complex technical and domain concepts into clear, strategic guidance are essential. Learn more about the career areas and business divisions at wellsfargojobs.com.

Requirements

7+ years of Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
7+ years of experience in building prime brokerage or capital markets applications
7+ years of high-performance programming techniques in Java
5+ years of experience in Java, Spring Boot, JPA, Microservices, SQL and NoSQL
2+ years of experience in Kubernetes/OpenShift & cloud technologies
5+ years of experience in Apache Kafka/Solace/MQ
5+ years of Experience with SDLC and Agile tools such as JIRA, GitHub, Jenkins, Confluence etc.
2+years of experience on GenAI enabled solutions, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic workflows, with a strong understanding of prompt engineering, grounding, and extensibility
2+years hands-on experience with major GenAI platforms (e.g., Microsoft VS Code, GitHub Copilot)

Nice To Haves

2+ years of direct experience in Prime Brokerage, Equity Finance, Delta‑1, Synthetic Financing, or Margin/Risk technology
SME on Equities and Equity derivatives securities
Familiarity with FIX connectivity and clearing broker/service bureau integrations
Knowledge of core computer science design concepts, algorithms, and data structures
Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP), enterprise-grade agentic workflows is highly desirable
Experience with risk, margin and regulatory calculators and reporting capabilities
Knowledge building high capacity, high volume, low latency technology for margin workflow supporting various business units in Commercial Investment Banking
Deep knowledge of LLM and API integration, including RESTful API design.

Responsibilities

Lead complex initiatives on selected domains
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
Lead team to achieve objectives
Partner with production support and platform engineering teams effectively
Define and govern standard patterns for AI‑assisted and LLM‑based software development, including prompt‑driven development, automated test generation, diagnostics, documentation, and developer productivity tooling
Architect and guide enterprise‑standard LLM integrations, including MCP‑based services, used across development tooling, system observability, and controlled automation
Establish and enforce guardrails for reliable, explainable, auditable, and secure AI usage within electronic trading technology
Partner with platform, security, risk, and compliance teams to ensure AI‑enabled engineering workflows meet Wells Fargo standards for data protection, regulatory compliance, and model risk management
Continuously evaluate advances in GenAI, agentic AI, and applied machine learning to refine engineering practices and platform capabilities where appropriate (AI‑enabled development is considered a baseline capability across the engineering organization; this role ensures architectural consistency, operational safety, and enterprise scale.)