Senior Consultant - Software Engineering

About Principal Financial Group

Principal Financial Group stands as a prominent provider of diverse financial services, including retirement solutions, investment services, and life and health insurance. With a heritage spanning over 125 years and a workforce of 14,000 employees, Principal is recognized as a leader within the financial and insurance sector. The company fosters an inclusive workplace culture at its modern facility in Magarpatta City, Pune, seeking professionals dedicated to maintaining its values and tradition.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership and develop expertise on extensive parts of Principal's software solutions across multiple systems, including implementation and support.
• Devise application and system roadmaps with a 6 to 12-month outlook.
• Apply enterprise-level methodologies, tools, processes, and design patterns to implementations, advancing adoption within the business unit.
• Lead efforts for continuous improvement within your scope of influence.
• Identify and innovate new business and technology opportunities aligned with high-level initiatives.
• Advocate an automation-first approach to streamline business processes.
• Collaborate with both internal and external stakeholders to deliver comprehensive solutions.
• Design, lead, and clearly communicate technical concepts to business and technical teams, ensuring consensus and buy-in.
• Support and develop broad architecture; design and build complex services, significant libraries, or essential infrastructure components.
• Analyze intricate problems efficiently, distinguishing knowns and unknowns, facilitating faster resolution with trade-offs considering the entire system.
• Excel in debugging complex issues encountered by the team.
• Predict potential technical challenges at the product level and make preemptive design and architectural decisions.
• Implement design thinking methodologies to improve solution outcomes.
• Understand and influence business strategies to align technical decisions with organizational objectives.
• Stay consistently updated on technology trends relevant to the domain.
• Promote skill growth within the team, mentoring senior staff to enhance their ownership and competence in all layers of software development.
• Enhance team effectiveness by facilitating collaboration across teams.
• Encourage an engineering mindset among team members.
• Contribute to communities of practice for knowledge sharing and networking across business units.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Master's in Computer Science, or a related field.
• 10 to 13 years of experience in IT application development.
• Proficiency in programming with Java and TypeScript, including strong coding, debugging, and production support skills.
• Expertise in solution design and architecture encompassing High-Level Design (HLD), Low-Level Design (LLD), SOLID principles, 12-Factor app methodologies, design patterns, and architecture trade-offs.
• In-depth knowledge of distributed systems focusing on event-driven architectures and CQRS.
• Hands-on experience with AWS Cloud services such as S3, Lambda, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Fargate, Docker, and CloudWatch.
• Expertise in non-functional requirements engineering, including security, performance, scalability, reliability, observability, and maintainability by design.
• Strong background in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering practices, including CI/CD pipelines, blue-green deployments, monitoring, incident management, and operational excellence.
• Proven technical leadership through ownership, architecture reviews, mentoring, and promoting engineering best practices.

Desirable Skills

• Practical experience with streaming platforms such as Kafka or Kinesis.
• Container orchestration skills using Kubernetes or EKS.
• Infrastructure automation with Terraform or similar Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Knowledge of Domain-Driven Design including domain modeling and bounded context.
• Familiarity with event sourcing and advanced scalable distributed architecture patterns.
• Exposure to AIOps and advanced monitoring for intelligent operational insights.
• Expertise in security architecture encompassing threat modeling and secure design.
• Interest or experience in AI/GenAI engineering, particularly AI-driven application development and automation.

Additional Information

As a leader at Principal Financial Group, you will be expected to embody company values and ethics, champion diversity and inclusion, and uphold the code of conduct. This role reports to a Program Manager and does not have direct reports. The environment encourages continuous learning and engagement in communities of practice for broader collaboration and best practice sharing.