Principal Engineer

Thrivent•Minneapolis, MN

13d

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer in Engineering Productivity, you provide technical leadership that shapes how engineering capabilities evolve across the enterprise. You influence platform direction across automation and integration, engineering experiences, and engineering flow and visibility, guiding architectural patterns and shared capabilities that help teams work effectively at scale while continuously leveling up their craft. This role emphasizes improving the developer experience by helping teams assess their current state, learn new approaches and patterns that reduce unnecessary complexity, and practice those improvements through real delivery work. Through this cycle of assessment, learning, and reinforcement, you enable teams to adopt reliable, secure, and scalable paths for designing, building, and deploying solutions. Success requires influencing senior leaders, partnering closely with platform, infrastructure, and security teams, and earning the trust of the engineering community through hands‑on engagement, clear storytelling, and a strong bias for action that translates complex, ambiguous needs into practical, high‑impact outcomes.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience
10+ years of experience in an engineering role
5+ years of experience leading high performing technology teams
Demonstrated ability to influence both 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
Coach / mentor other team members as appropriate

Responsibilities

Designing Solutions Apply expert industry knowledge and broad understanding of multiple disciplines with technical knowledge to drive outcomes for customers. Creates the overall design /architecture for the team and articulates the components, interactions between the components /between product groups. Ability to work and problem solve independently on initiatives that align to the broader software engineering strategy.
Implementing Solutions Use independent, critical thinking to solve complex problems which are significant to the customer. Uses application and system data, as well as past experiences to inform decision making. Leader in technical expertise; Develops most architecturally impactful components of solutions. Drop into teams to create engineering structures/patterns that enable the team to work collaboratively and effectively. Creates new development frameworks and collaborates with the team to create solution components.
Learning and Applying New Techniques Leads the initiative to research new techniques along with best practices and share it across organization.
Collaborating Within the Team Participate in team’s collaboration session to provide technical expertise to solve most complex and/or architecturally impactful problem/remove technical roadblocks for the team. Participate in product planning and implementation. Helps product owner to create technical user stories as required/needed. Technical leader in system design across multiple teams; Provides broad and/or deep expertise in collaborating across teams to create solutions that lead to outcomes. Broker solution design and implementation across product teams to achieve outcomes for the most critical technology and/or strategic priorities for the organization.
Collaborating Across Teams Promote cross team adherence to technology standards and target architecture. Technical leader in system design across multiple teams; Provides broad and/or deep expertise in collaborating across teams to create solutions that lead to outcomes. Broker solution design and implementation across product teams to achieve outcomes for the most critical technology and/or strategic priorities for the organization.
Collaborating Across the Organization Expert in design, developing, documenting and analyzing overall architecture of systems, including hardware and software. Work in collaboration with other product teams to provide technical expertise to engineers across the company. Creates design patterns for the enterprise and provides technology insights that guide the strategic technology vision for the organization. Provides the feedback loop from teams back to operations as new requirements for operationalizing products become necessary. May do this through PoCs or full implementations.
Setting Product/Platform Technology Strategy Define the high-level capabilities requirements for the product/ platform and collaborate with the teams across the organization. Provide platform technology expertise to teams within product group as well as interdependent teams across the organization.
Defining Engineering Standards/Patterns Partner with the engineering community inside and outside Thrivent in establishing best practices. Define and share engineering standards across internal teams and collaborate to help engineers apply these patterns to build solutions that achieve outcomes. Participates in external activities including open-source software contributions and meetups.
DevOps Lead the resolution of critical incidents and provides technical leadership in proactively addressing critical production issues/outages. Able to assess and introduce technology to build more stable, scalable, and resilient software. Evaluate, recommend and execute new CI/CD components to make the products more stable for a given area. Build partnership across technical areas to influence when needed.
Selecting and Managing Technology Vendors Consults on the evaluation process for software solutions - provides technical advise on how solutions play into the larger strategy of product areas. Contribute in criteria evaluation for selecting the right platforms and softwares for the product team.
Coaching Engineers Provide guidance and reinforcement around established engineering best practices across product groups and the organization. Provide technical leadership and mentoring to other engineers across the organization. Provide trainings and demos to address knowledge gaps across teams and product groups.
Recruiting and Building Talent Engage in the tech community to build the Thrivent technology brand and position as the employer of choice in the market. Contributes / helps in the recruitment process to hire the right engineering talent for the organization. Models Thrivent’s leadership competencies: Model the Way, Rally the Team, and Deliver Outcomes. Supports and/or develops an environment in which Thrivent employees and colleagues are focused on continuous improvement, exceptional employee engagement, and an unwavering commitment to our clients. Shapes and/or supports a culture that represents the Thrivent purpose, promise and values, ensuring that Thrivent’s trust and reputation remain strong with its clients.