Lead Innovation Software Engineer

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General Function:

The Lead Innovation Software Engineer partners across Technology, Product, Strategy, and line-of-business teams to help define and demonstrate the future of Fifth Third Bank’s products, services, and enterprise architecture. This is a hands-on innovation role for a builder, strategist, and collaborator who can connect human-centered design with strong technical depth. The person in this role helps teams evaluate and apply emerging technologies, modern engineering practices, and new ways of working to accelerate product innovation and improve delivery. They may lead a major initiative or several smaller efforts while influencing stakeholders and development teams toward modern, practical solutions.

This role offers the opportunity to work closely with production squads on meaningful, high-priority initiatives while gaining a deep understanding of the bank’s technology stack, products, and delivery environment. By pairing strategic thinking with real-world execution, the Lead Innovation Software Engineer helps turn ideas into practical demonstrations, prototypes, and capability visions that can influence enterprise direction.

We are looking for someone with strong curiosity, a forward-looking mindset, and a passion for staying current on emerging technology and fintech trends. The Lead Innovation Software Engineer should be an active user of artificial intelligence and a thoughtful advocate for responsible adoption. This person brings creativity, analytical thinking, and strong communication to the role, using data, prototypes, and other tangible artifacts to explore ideas, improve processes, and help others understand what is possible and how we might achieve it.

The Lead Innovation Software Engineer will be responsible and accountable for risk by openly exchanging ideas and opinions, elevating concerns, and personally following policies and procedures as defined. This position acts as the liaison between the Risk, Audit and Analytic teams.  Accountable for always doing the right thing for customers and colleagues and ensures that actions and behaviors drive a positive customer experience. While operating within the Bank's risk appetite, achieves results by consistently identifying, assessing, managing, monitoring, and reporting risks of all types.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Develop a strong understanding of Fifth Third Bank’s current and future-state technology and product architecture
• Help shape the bank’s evolution as a product-led enterprise built on a modern technology foundation
• Identify and prioritize opportunities to expand enterprise technology capabilities in support of customer and product innovation
• Partner with engineers, architects, and line-of-business leaders to envision, demonstrate, and develop new or improved financial products, business processes, and technology-enabled capabilities
• Lead end-to-end data workflows including extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) from structured and unstructured sources; perform quantitative and qualitative analysis; and develop interactive dashboards and visualizations (e.g., Power BI) to support decision-making, stakeholder reporting, and product insights.
• Identify, evaluate, and benchmark fintechs and emerging startups by analyzing their technology architecture, product capabilities, business models, and financial viability; synthesize findings into comparative assessments and strategic recommendations aligned to enterprise priorities and market relevance.
• Influence enterprise thinking on the future of technology across innovation, software development, fintech, artificial intelligence, and digital assets
• Lead or contribute to research and evaluation of emerging design, technology, industry, and market trends
• Translate customer needs, competitor activity, industry shifts, and technology developments into actionable insights
• Provide technical leadership, guidance, and mentorship to team members and partners
• Recognize meaningful patterns across industry, technology, and cultural change and explain their business impact
• Use systems thinking to connect ideas across products, platforms, teams, and enterprise capabilities
• Design solutions with the broader business and technology ecosystem in mind
• Apply structured problem solving and root cause analysis to address challenges and uncover new opportunities
• Recommend technology options and design approaches to senior leaders and key stakeholders
• Create compelling narratives, demonstrations, prototypes, and communications that bring concepts to life
• Share lessons learned, best practices, and new ideas across the team and broader organization

Supervisory Responsibilities: None.

Knowledge, Skills & Ability Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience
• 5+ years of experience in roles closely aligned to the responsibilities of this position
• Strong front-end development experience delivering commercial solutions using modern web standards and frameworks such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Angular, React, Vue, or similar tools
• Strong back-end development experience working with APIs, services, event-driven architectures using Kafka, databases, SQL, and modern data platforms such as Snowflake, with a clear understanding of how front-end frameworks integrate with back-end systems
• Deep experience with at least one server-side language such as Python, Java, Node.js, or PHP
• Infrastructure experience building, configuring, and supporting scalable web applications in cloud or hosted environments such as AWS or Azure
• Experience with modern server-side tooling, deployment practices, and hosting models
• Experience working in a mature DevOps environment using version control, CI/CD, and automated testing practices
• Proficiency with generative AI for productivity and full-lifecycle software development
• Strong working knowledge of SQL and modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake), along with experience building and consuming data pipelines across both real-time/event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, APIs) and batch/integration patterns for one-off or analytical use cases
• Familiarity with end-to-end data lifecycle—from ingestion through transformation to visualization—including use of analytics and reporting tools (e.g., Power BI) and/or integrated data platforms (e.g., Dataiku) to support business insights and decision-making
• Strong understanding of agile product development and iterative delivery
• Working knowledge of blockchain, digital assets, smart contracts, and web3 technologies
• Ability to make sound design decisions and clearly explain the rationale behind them
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to build trust with team members, business partners, and customers and use those relationships to identify new opportunities
• Commitment to mentoring others and sharing knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned
• Ability to identify meaningful opportunities for change and translate them into effective design or technology responses
• Comfort working iteratively, making informed decisions with incomplete information, and adapting based on feedback
• Strong attention to detail

Position not available for immigration sponsorship

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At Fifth Third, we understand the importance of recognizing our employees for the role they play in improving the lives of our customers, communities and each other. Our Total Rewards include comprehensive benefits and differentiated compensation offerings to give each employee the opportunity to be their best every day.

The base salary for this position is reflective of the range of salary levels for all roles within this pay grade across the U.S. Individual salaries within this range will vary based on factors such as role, relevant skillset, relevant experience, education and geographic location. In addition to the base salary, this role is eligible to participate in an incentive compensation plan, with any such payment based upon company, line of business and/or individual performance.

Our extensive benefits programs are designed to support the individual needs of our employees and their families, encompassing physical, financial, emotional and social well-being. You can learn more about those programs on our 53.com Careers page at: https://www.53.com/content/fifth-third/en/careers/benefits.html or by consulting with your talent acquisition partner. 

Attention search firms and staffing agencies: do not submit unsolicited resumes for this posting.  Fifth Third does not accept resumes from any agency that does not have an active agreement with Fifth Third.  Any unsolicited resumes – no matter how they are submitted – will be considered the property of Fifth Third and Fifth Third will not be responsible for any associated fee.

Fifth Third Bank, National Association is proud to have an engaged and inclusive culture and to promote and ensure equal employment opportunity in all employment decisions regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military status, veteran status or any other legally protected status.