Principal Engineer

Thrivent•Minneapolis, MN

7d•$161,436 - $218,415•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Engineer establishes engineering vision and bridges strategic intent with scalable execution for Thrivent’s Customized Experience Platform (CEP). The role drives technical direction and engineering strategy across experience channels, with a focus on content management, digital delivery, experimentation, mobile and web app engineering, observability, experience analytics, and developer experience. The Principal Engineer shapes the paved paths used by teams building web, mobile, and content-driven experiences, ensuring platform investments improve delivery speed, reliability, business value, and measurable customer outcomes. This role requires systems-level judgment, the ability to operate platforms as products for engineering teams, and credibility to lead through influence. The Principal Engineer collaborates with product, design, and senior technology leaders to define platform capabilities, roadmaps, architecture, standards, and reusable patterns. The role also provides technical leadership across teams, helps resolve critical production incidents, evaluates technologies and vendors, mentors engineers, and contributes to recruiting and the broader technology community.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or another technical field, or equivalent work experience.
10 or more years of experience in an engineering role.
5 or more years of experience leading high-performing technology teams.
Proven record of establishing architecture, standards, and reusable patterns for customer-facing digital experience channels, such as web, mobile, content management, digital asset management, experimentation, observability, or developer experience capabilities.
Demonstrated ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences.
Demonstrated participation and leadership in the broader technology community.
Meet or exceed all expectations of a Lead Engineer role.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in a related field.
Financial Services industry experience.
Experience coaching or mentoring team members, particularly in analysis skills such as selecting metrics, breaking down strategy, and experimentation.

Responsibilities

Establish engineering vision and technical direction for the Customized Experience Platform across experience channels.
Design cross-channel solutions and architecture for platform capabilities, explaining how architectural choices affect delivery speed, quality, reliability, and customer outcomes.
Independently solve complex customer and engineering problems using application and system data, experience, and critical thinking.
Develop architecturally impactful solution components and embed with teams as needed to establish effective engineering structures and unblock implementation.
Create development frameworks and solution components that accelerate adoption of paved paths across web, mobile, and content-driven experiences.
Research new techniques and best practices, including methods such as event storming and stakeholder interviews, and share findings across the organization.
Contribute technical expertise in team collaboration sessions to solve complex or architecturally impactful problems and remove technical roadblocks.
Participate in product planning and implementation; help product owners translate customer outcomes into technical strategy, capability roadmaps, actionable engineering work, performance metrics, and experimentation opportunities.
Lead system design across multiple teams and broker solution design and implementation to support critical organizational technology and strategic priorities.
Promote adherence to technology standards and target architecture across teams.
Design, develop, document, and analyze system architecture, collaborating with product teams and engineers across the company.
Create enterprise design patterns and provide technology insights that guide the organization’s strategic technology vision.
Communicate operational requirements back to teams and operations, using proofs of concept or full implementations where appropriate.
Define high-level product and platform capability requirements and provide platform technology expertise to product-group and interdependent teams.
Partner with the engineering community inside and outside Thrivent to establish and share engineering standards and best practices.
Participate in external technology activities, including open-source contributions and meetups.
Lead resolution of critical incidents and provide technical leadership in proactively addressing production issues and outages.
Assess and introduce technologies that improve software stability, scalability, and resilience; evaluate, recommend, and execute CI/CD components.
Build partnerships across technical areas and consult on software evaluation and platform selection in the context of broader product strategy.
Reinforce engineering best practices and help teams improve product performance metrics.
Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership, training, and demonstrations to address knowledge gaps.
Engage with the technology community to strengthen Thrivent’s technology brand and support recruitment of engineering talent.
Model Thrivent’s leadership competencies and support a culture of continuous improvement, employee engagement, client commitment, and alignment with Thrivent’s purpose, promise, and values.