Principal Engineer - Application Architecture

Fidelity • Boston, MA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Fidelity Labs is hiring a principal-level engineer for its Boston Seaport headquarters to own the technical vision and architectural direction for Foundation Services, an early-stage SaaS platform for the charitable sector. The platform is built with Angular, Java Spring Boot, AWS, and YugabyteDB. The Principal Engineer will own end-to-end technical architecture and act as a senior technical resource across the engineering team, shaping architectural decisions and standards while contributing code and expertise across software and infrastructure. The role reports to the Director of Architecture and collaborates with engineering, product, UX, enterprise architecture, and other stakeholders.

Fidelity Labs is Fidelity Investments’ in-house fintech incubator. Its teams explore and test new business ideas, build new products and services, and scale promising concepts within an existing business unit or as a new venture. The environment combines startup-style experimentation and adaptability with the scale and stability of an industry leader.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 4 years in a principal architect or senior technical leadership role.
• Deep expertise in Java Spring Boot, RESTful API design, and enterprise application architecture patterns.
• Strong frontend architecture knowledge, including Angular, component design, and modular application structures.
• Proven experience designing cloud-native solutions on AWS, including multi-region resiliency, infrastructure strategy, and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
• Hands-on experience with relational and distributed database systems.
• Experience producing Architecture Decision Records and driving technical decisions collaboratively with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Solid understanding of DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code concepts.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex architectural concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• High degree of ownership and autonomy, with the ability to drive long-horizon technical strategy with minimal direction.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with workflow engine design or BPM platforms such as Temporal or Camunda.
• Familiarity with Fidelity enterprise tooling, including the Fidelity Developer Toolkit or related SDKs.
• Prior work in a startup or incubator environment defining architecture from the ground up.
• Experience with authorization patterns, fine-grained access control, and enterprise security standards in a SaaS context.
• Background in fintech or financial services platforms, particularly charitable giving or wealth management.
• Familiarity with active/active database strategies such as YugabyteDB or similar.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural design and decision-making across the frontend, backend, cloud infrastructure, and data tiers, and produce well-reasoned Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
• Define and evolve the platform architecture, including Experience APIs, Domain APIs, authorization models, workflow engines, and cloud resiliency strategies, in alignment with enterprise standards and the well-architected framework.
• Establish and enforce standards for API design, Spring Boot patterns, code quality, and security across engineering squads.
• Collaborate with Product, UX, and Engineering leadership to translate business requirements into scalable, secure, and maintainable technical solutions.
• Provide engineering teams with subject-matter expertise in Spring Boot, RESTful API standards, coding best practices, and DevOps tools and pipelines.
• Partner with enterprise architecture teams to align with Fidelity’s technology strategy, security requirements, and compliance posture.
• Evaluate technologies and conduct technical spikes to inform platform evolution and architectural decisions.
• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering technical rigor, continuous improvement, and ownership.
• Contribute code and collaborate on API standards, coding practices, DevOps strategy, and technical excellence.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health care coverage.
• Emotional well-being support.
• Retirement benefits.
• Generous paid time off.
• Parental leave.
• Charitable giving employee match program.
• Educational assistance, including student loan repayment, tuition reimbursement, and learning resources.

What This Job Offers

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