Principal Engineer

TQL • Charlotte, NC

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer, Financial Operations, you will provide technical leadership across the systems and teams supporting critical Financial Operations capabilities. You will partner with Engineering, Product, Architecture, Data, and business stakeholders to modernize complex processes and create scalable, resilient solutions that support TQL’s growth.

You will help define and execute technical strategy for the Financial Operations ecosystem, balancing modernization of existing applications with adoption of new platforms, cloud capabilities, third-party products, APIs, and automation. This is a highly influential, hands-on role focused on setting architectural direction across teams, solving complex technical challenges, reducing unnecessary complexity and manual processing, and aligning solutions with a cohesive long-term technology strategy.

The position is based in Cincinnati, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; or Tampa, Florida, with relocation assistance provided. The work environment is hybrid, with the ability to work remotely 40 hours per month.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and delivering large-scale enterprise applications and distributed systems.
• Proven experience providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams without relying on direct reporting authority.
• Deep experience designing enterprise application architectures, including APIs, services, integrations, data flows, and distributed systems.
• Strong hands-on development experience with .NET/C#, REST APIs, SQL Server, TypeScript/React, or comparable enterprise technology stacks.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications and incrementally migrating capabilities toward modern service-based and cloud architectures.
• Strong understanding of API design, system integration patterns, service boundaries, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing highly available, resilient, observable, and horizontally scalable systems.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure or comparable cloud platforms.
• Experience with containerization, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices using technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and automated deployment pipelines.
• Experience integrating enterprise SaaS platforms and third-party products into complex application ecosystems.
• Ability to evaluate build-versus-buy decisions based on business capability, architectural fit, cost, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability.
• Ability to navigate complex existing systems, understand dependencies and business processes, and create pragmatic modernization paths rather than requiring large-scale rewrites.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical topics to engineers, business stakeholders, and senior leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and drive alignment around architectural standards and engineering practices.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in financial systems, billing, accounts receivable, accounting workflows, ERP platforms, or other Back Office domains.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across Financial Operations engineering teams and help translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Define and evolve target architecture for Financial Operations applications, APIs, integrations, workflow and orchestration, data flows, and third-party platforms.
• Lead modernization efforts that simplify legacy technology, clarify system responsibilities and boundaries, and reduce technical complexity.
• Identify opportunities to increase straight-through processing and automation, reducing manual work and improving operational efficiency.
• Develop proofs of concept and production solutions combining AI agents with APIs, enterprise data, workflow orchestration, and existing applications.
• Design resilient integration patterns across internal applications, enterprise platforms, financial systems, and third-party solutions.
• Establish reusable patterns for APIs, services, event-driven integrations, workflow orchestration, and application architecture.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and business stakeholders to align technology decisions with immediate needs and long-term strategy.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions and determine whether capabilities should be developed internally, delivered by enterprise platforms, or provided by third-party products.
• Lead architectural design sessions and technical discovery for large, cross-functional initiatives.
• Remain hands-on by developing proofs of concept, reviewing critical implementations, solving complex engineering problems, and contributing code where appropriate.
• Identify systemic reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability risks and drive root-cause solutions.
• Improve observability and traceability across distributed business processes and critical Financial Operations transactions.
• Establish engineering standards and reusable patterns that improve consistency, maintainability, security, and delivery speed.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads to raise engineering capability and technical depth across the organization.
• Develop pragmatic modernization roadmaps that enable incremental movement from legacy architectures without disrupting critical business operations.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance
• Continuous education and technical training, including reimbursement opportunities
• Hybrid work environment with the ability to work remotely 40 hours per month

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed