Senior Software Engineer – Backend Platforms, Vice President (Wealth Custody & Clearing)

State Street • Princeton, NJ

13h

About The Position

State Street’s Wealth Custody & Clearing (WC&C) business provides custody, clearing, and platform services to wealth managers, broker dealers, and financial institutions. The Senior Software Engineer will provide technical leadership across backend and data platforms, shaping architecture, engineering standards, and reliability for mission-critical wealth technology.

As a senior technical leader within the WC&C Technology team, the role architects, designs, and leads development of high-scale, low-latency distributed systems in a cloud-native environment. Operating at a staff/principal level, the engineer influences architecture and practices across teams and domains, partnering with product, data, risk, and business stakeholders to deliver systems that meet stringent accuracy, availability, security, and regulatory requirements.

Requirements

• At least 9 years of backend software engineering experience, including a strong record building and scaling distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience operating at a Staff or Principal Engineer level and influencing multiple teams or technical domains.
• Expertise designing systems with high availability, fault tolerance, and strong data consistency guarantees.
• Track record of ownership over large-scale architecture decisions and long-term system evolution.
• Experience working in production-critical environments where reliability, accuracy, and operational excellence are paramount.
• Strong understanding of wealth management, brokerage, or financial services platforms.
• Experience building systems requiring high precision, full auditability, and regulatory compliance.
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, and microservices-based architectures.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms and container orchestration.
• Proficiency with data storage technologies, including PostgreSQL, distributed data stores, and caching layers.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems, and API design.
• Strong understanding of system design tradeoffs, including consistency, latency, scalability, and resiliency.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• AWS cloud experience is preferred.
• Working knowledge of financial regulations or standards such as SEC, FINRA, or GDPR.
• Familiarity with portfolio management and rebalancing, trading systems and order lifecycle management, market data ingestion and processing, account structures, tax optimization, or retirement products.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead development of high-scale, low-latency backend systems supporting custody, clearing, and wealth platforms.
• Define and enforce engineering standards, architectural patterns, and system design principles across backend teams.
• Drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for distributed systems and data platforms.
• Partner with product, data, and business leaders to translate complex requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards across the organization.
• Lead critical incident response, performance optimization, and system reliability initiatives for production platforms.
• Evaluate, recommend, and introduce technologies aligned with WC&C’s strategic and regulatory objectives.
• Ensure systems meet enterprise expectations for resiliency, observability, auditability, and security.

Benefits

• 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match.
• Insurance coverage including basic life, medical, dental, vision, and long-term disability, plus optional additional coverages.
• Paid time off, including vacation, sick leave, short-term disability, and family care responsibilities.
• Access to an Employee Assistance Program.
• Incentive compensation, including eligibility for annual performance-based awards, with exclusions noted for certain sales roles.
• Eligibility for certain tax-advantaged savings plans.
• Inclusive development opportunities, flexible work-life support, paid volunteer days, and employee networks.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior