Principal Software Engineer (US)

TD Bank • Mount Laurel, NJ

1d • $148,720 - $240,240

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer provides technical expertise and leadership to develop bank-wide and industry-wide solutions that address capability gaps and create value for customers. The role plans, evaluates, recommends, designs, operationalizes, and supports efficient, reliable, scalable, and secure solutions. It sets technical direction to address emerging business needs and strategies, advances architecture and technology capabilities in line with industry developments, and teaches, mentors, and coaches others while advocating for recognition of their work.

As a leading authority in software engineering, the Principal Software Engineer autonomously leads complex, high-profile, high-risk initiatives with enterprise impact. The role establishes engineering working groups, guides executive leadership, and sets standards and direction for engineering professionals. It combines software engineering, architecture, solution architecture, application security, and coding expertise, primarily at the enterprise level.

The role advances engineering practices, standards, tools, automation, architecture, and end-to-end solution delivery. It partners with business, technology, architecture, infrastructure, security, and operations stakeholders to design, build, review, and operationalize solutions aligned with business requirements, enterprise architecture, performance needs, and development standards. It also supports risk management, regulatory alignment, operational resilience, continuous improvement, and the development of engineering colleagues.

The position is based in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. The listed work schedule is 40 hours, and the salary range is $148,720–$240,240 USD. The job description lists domestic travel as occasional and international travel as never. Physical activity is predominantly sedentary, with continuous requirements for multiple-task performance, standard office equipment operation, concentration, and reading, writing, and comprehending instructions.

Requirements

• Undergraduate degree, postgraduate degree, or technical certificate; a strong academic background such as computer science or engineering is specified.
• 15 years of relevant experience.
• 15 or more years of progressive software engineering experience, including at least 7 years in senior technical leadership, architecture, or enterprise-scale engineering transformation roles in complex, highly regulated environments.
• Deep hands-on engineering expertise, including ability to work in complex codebases, troubleshoot critical production incidents, perform root-cause analysis, and lead technical remediation during high-severity situations.
• At least 10 years of experience driving SDLC and PDLC transformation, including Agile/SAFe, DevSecOps, CI/CD, engineering productivity, developer experience, quality engineering, and release automation.
• Ability to identify systemic delivery bottlenecks and achieve measurable improvements in engineering throughput, quality, and predictability.
• At least 8 years of experience designing or modernizing distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and resilient, scalable applications; strong architecture fundamentals and ability to make complex trade-offs.
• At least 5 years of platform engineering experience, including enterprise-scale internal developer platforms, reusable engineering services, developer self-service, environment management, infrastructure automation, and performance engineering adopted across multiple engineering organizations.
• At least 3 years of practical experience applying AI/ML and Generative AI to software engineering, including hands-on implementation of AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, intelligent test generation, code modernization, automated code reviews, and AI-driven productivity solutions with measurable production outcomes.
• Proficiency in modern engineering technologies, including Java or Python, cloud platforms, containerization, Kubernetes, microservices, REST APIs, CI/CD frameworks, and infrastructure as code.
• Ability to review code, evaluate architecture decisions, and guide implementation of technically complex solutions.
• Track record of leading enterprise-scale engineering modernization, translating ambiguous business and technology challenges into executable strategies and scalable platforms with measurable improvements in reliability, developer productivity, time to market, and total cost of ownership.
• Expertise in production engineering and operational resilience, including SRE practices, observability, SLOs/SLIs, distributed tracing, performance optimization, incident management, and automated recovery.
• Experience building systems with stringent availability, scalability, and regulatory requirements.
• Ability to influence enterprise technology strategy while remaining technically hands-on and driving cross-functional transformation across product, engineering, infrastructure, security, and operations teams.
• Experience designing and operationalizing AI-native engineering workflows across the full software delivery lifecycle, with measurable improvements in productivity, quality, and cycle time.
• Proven enterprise-scale adoption of engineering platforms, automation frameworks, or AI-powered solutions used by 500 or more engineers or 100 or more applications.
• Ability to establish engineering-effectiveness metrics such as DORA, flow efficiency, change failure rate, MTTR, developer productivity, and AI return on investment, and translate improvements into quantifiable financial and business outcomes.
• Ability to provide technical leadership, set direction for other software engineering professionals, and mentor and coach team members.

Nice To Haves

• Graduate degree.
• Experience in financial services or other complex, highly regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Advance software engineering practices through processes and tools, and set development and design standards at the business-unit and/or enterprise level.
• Execute engineering strategy for introducing tools and automating build, test, release, and configuration activities across applications, platforms, and infrastructure.
• Lead the creation of solution options and comprehensive end-to-end solutions, coordinating relevant stakeholders to support development initiatives.
• Develop and document detailed solution designs and act as an application subject-matter expert through the design and development lifecycle, ensuring alignment with architecture.
• Lead complex application and systems development, programming, and coding.
• Develop functional, technical, and user-interface designs that meet business requirements, enterprise architecture direction, system performance needs, and development standards.
• Consult on requirements and specifications and apply business-function knowledge to design optimal software and systems.
• Review technical deliverables throughout design and development to ensure quality, identify gaps, and recommend redesign where needed.
• Identify, recommend, source, negotiate, and implement improvements or buy/build/reuse solutions to enhance customer experience and availability or reduce cost.
• Work with technology partners to define application metrics and performance goals.
• Identify and address application, data, cross-capability, and cross-release issues affecting application integrity.
• Research and analyze business requirements, recommend solutions within the business technology architecture, and gather infrastructure environment requirements using technical tools and utilities.
• Work with architects to ensure environment modifications interact appropriately, data-conversion impacts are considered, and project performance requirements are met.
• Contribute to the advancement of TD's engineering practice through collaboration, research, analysis, and problem solving.
• Adhere to enterprise frameworks and methodologies related to software engineering; ensure programs, policies, and practices are well managed, meet business needs, comply with requirements, and align with priorities.
• Engage stakeholders at all levels to promote proactive defect prevention, continuous improvement, and automation opportunities.
• Analyze functional or enterprise-level outcomes, draw conclusions, make recommendations, and assess program, policy, or practice effectiveness.
• Identify opportunities to minimize cost and recommend or deliver strategic solutions that support cost effectiveness and improve stakeholder experience.
• Conduct code reviews and Operational Readiness Reviews; support quality, standards compliance, reusability, maintainability, and solution-design review and sign-off processes.
• Monitor service, productivity, and efficiency and implement process or performance improvements.
• Lead, facilitate, or implement remediation plans for performance, risk, and governance issues.
• Manage relationships across business lines and control functions and ensure alignment with enterprise and regulatory requirements.
• Identify and manage organizational risks, escalate non-standard or high-risk activities, and keep current with emerging issues, trends, and regulatory requirements.
• Promote risk management and control in alignment with risk appetite.
• Participate as a team member, support a positive and collaborative work environment, and communicate relevant issues and project progress.
• Provide thought leadership and industry knowledge on engineering best practices and participate in knowledge transfer.
• Keep current with emerging trends and develop knowledge of the business, tools, and techniques.
• Participate in personal performance and development activities, including cross-training.
• Mentor and enable team members by sharing knowledge and engineering best practices; provide guidance and proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Lead, motivate, and develop productive relationships with internal and external business partners and stakeholders.
• Support a fair, positive, equitable, and diverse workplace and represent the business area and bank as a brand ambassador.
• Lead enterprise engineering modernization and transformation initiatives, influence technology strategy, and guide architectural decisions while remaining technically hands-on.
• Design and operationalize AI-native engineering workflows across the software delivery lifecycle, including requirements, architecture, coding, testing, deployment, and production operations.
• Build and scale platforms, automation frameworks, or AI-powered solutions for enterprise adoption and measure engineering effectiveness and business value.

Benefits

• Base salary and variable compensation/incentive awards, potentially including cash and/or equity incentive awards through an incentive plan.
• Health and well-being benefits.
• Savings and retirement programs.
• Paid time off, including Vacation PTO, Flex PTO, and Holiday PTO.
• Banking benefits and discounts.
• Career development, training programs, and access to an online learning platform and mentoring programs.
• Reward and recognition.

What This Job Offers

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