Software Engineer Principal

FIS•New York, NY

4d•$206,000 - $350,200•Onsite

About The Position

Sits within a newly acquired startup building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions within the banking group. The team is small and senior, with high autonomy and accountability, and an engineer owns services through the whole life cycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation and continuous improvement. That includes on-call and incident response. This is not a remote or hybrid role, the team works in person every day in our NYC office. The role builds, operates, and scales the services at the heart of the platform — spanning Core Banking, workflows, and compliance. These systems define financial products, manage accounts, execute and record money movement, orchestrate banking processes, and enforce regulatory rules at Tier-1 scale. Requires deep experience with complex distributed systems, a correctness-first mindset, sound engineering judgement, and full end-to-end ownership from design through production operation.

Requirements

Deep experience designing and building complex distributed systems at scale, using a strongly typed, compiled language. Go is preferred, but deep experience with a comparable language is welcome.
Experience with event-driven architectures and technologies such as Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms.
Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, invariants, idempotency, failure modes, and distributed-system trade-offs.
Substantial experience operating and debugging critical systems in production, ideally including on-call and incident response across application, data, and infrastructure boundaries.
Practical experience with observability, reliability engineering, capacity planning, deployment safety, and disaster recovery.
Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, GitOps, and modern production-engineering practices.
Practical judgement and common sense, with the ability to evaluate and clearly articulate architectural trade-offs rather than apply technologies or patterns mechanically.
Ability to explain complex systems in simple, precise terms and work effectively across coding, architecture, operations, and cross-team delivery.
Effective use of AI to amplify genuine engineering expertise, with human ownership of design, validation, security, and production outcomes.

Responsibilities

Build and evolve the capabilities that bring modern banking products to life — from products and accounts through transactions, transfers, journals, balances, and interest, to durable workflows and compliance controls.
Define reliable APIs, events, and data contracts that connect these capabilities into a coherent, auditable banking platform.
Own services throughout their lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.
Participate in on-call and incident response, diagnosing failures across distributed services, data infrastructure, and event-driven workflows.
Establish effective observability, alerting, operational controls, and recovery procedures; learn from production incidents to improve reliability, performance, and operational maturity.
Design systems for correctness, auditability, scalability, and resilience at Tier-1 banking scale, making pragmatic trade-offs between delivery speed, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability.
Improve engineering practices across automated testing, CI/CD, safe deployment, rollback, and recovery.
Use AI-assisted engineering, MCP servers, agent workflows, and automated runbooks where they materially improve engineering or operational outcomes.
Contribute to team excellence through knowledge sharing, mentoring, and coaching, helping to develop technical capability and promote engineering best practices across the organization