Principal Engineer

About this role:
Wells Fargo is seeking a Principal Engineer for Chief Development Experience Office / Quality and Test Engineering organization which enables critical test engineering product development to enable the Technology organization to achieve transformation. The function is positioned to build, engineer and evangelize Test Engineering products for the Technology organization
In this Role
The Principal Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for end-to-end technical architecture, design governance, and engineering leadership for cloud-native platforms and performance testing capabilities.
This role defines target-state architectures, drives technology strategy, and acts as the technical authority across Azure, OpenShift (Kubernetes), and enterprise performance testing platforms such as LoadRunner and BlazeMeter, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, resilient, and compliant with enterprise architecture standards.
This role operates at system, platform, and enterprise scale, influencing multiple teams, products, and lines of business.
Core Responsibilities
1. Architecture & Design Leadership

• Own current-state and target-state architecture for cloud-native and performance engineering platforms across Azure and OpenShift.
• Produce and govern architecture specifications, solution designs, and reference architectures aligned to enterprise architecture practices and
• Lead architecture reviews (CAR / design forums), identify gaps, risks, and non-compliance, and drive remediation plans.
• Ensure architectures meet security, resiliency, scalability, performance, and regulatory requirements.

2. Cloud & Platform Engineering Expertise (Azure & OCP)

• Architect and guide implementation of cloud-native platforms using:
  • Microsoft Azure (IaaS, PaaS, networking, identity, security)
  • OpenShift / Kubernetes for container orchestration and workload isolation
• Define standards for:
  • Multi-cluster OCP design
  • Networking, ingress, service mesh, and secrets management
  • Observability, logging, and capacity planning
• Influence platform roadmap decisions based on scalability, cost, and operational maturity.

3. Performance Engineering Architecture (LoadRunner & BlazeMeter)

• Act as technical authority for enterprise performance testing strategy and platforms.
• Design and evolve performance testing architectures using:
  • LoadRunner for enterprise-grade protocol coverage
  • BlazeMeter for cloud-native, CI/CD-driven, Kubernetes-based load generation
• Define shift-left performance testing models integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
• Standardize:
  • Test execution models
  • Baseline definitions
  • Result analysis and reporting frameworks
• Guide migration and coexistence strategies between LoadRunner and BlazeMeter where applicable.

4. Technical Governance & Standards

• Define and enforce engineering and architecture standards, patterns, and best practices across teams.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture and Governance to ensure alignment with federated architecture models
• Review and approve:
  • Design documents
  • Non-standard technology requests
  • Architecture deviations and risk acceptances
• Ensure tooling lifecycle governance (sunrise, standard, restricted, sunset).

5. Engineering Leadership & Influence

• Serve as principal technical mentor for senior engineers, architects, and platform leads.
• Provide hands-on guidance for:
  • Complex design challenges
  • Performance bottlenecks
  • Cloud and Kubernetes failure scenarios
• Influence technical direction without formal authority across multiple teams and products.
• Drive technical decision-making forums, architecture walkthroughs, and design deep dives.

6. Delivery & Operational Excellence

• Partner with product, platform, and delivery teams to ensure:
  • Designs are implementable and operable
  • Non-functional requirements are met before production
• Guide teams on:
  • Capacity planning
  • Resiliency testing
  • Performance readiness and production sign-off
• Ensure solutions support operational readiness, SRE practices, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education

Desired Qualifications:

• Cloud Architecture: Microsoft Azure (enterprise-scale design)
• Container Platforms: OpenShift / Kubernetes (advanced)
• Performance Engineering: LoadRunner, BlazeMeter, JMeter ecosystem
• CI/CD Integration: Performance testing within DevOps pipelines
• Architecture Governance: Architecture specs, standards, reviews
• Advanced Capabilities
• Distributed systems design
• Scalability and capacity modeling
• Security-by-design and compliance
• Platform observability and reliability engineering
• Technology evaluation and strategic trade-off analysis

Job Expectations:
1) End-to-End Software Development

• Develop responsive front-end applications using React / Angular / Vue.
• Build robust back-end services using Java/Spring Boot, Node.js, .NET Core, or Python.
• Design and implement RESTful and GraphQL APIs.
• Build scalable, modular, and maintainable codebases using industry best practices (SOLID, DRY, 12-factor).
• Leverage Generative AI tools (GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT-style assistants, Azure OpenAI) to accelerate coding, improve code quality, and automate repetitive development tasks.
• Use GenAI to create boilerplate code, unit tests, API mocks, and documentation while ensuring compliance with enterprise coding and security standards.
• Apply responsible AI usage by validating generated code, ensuring correctness, security, and production readiness.

2) Cloud Engineering - Azure

• Architect and deploy cloud-native applications on Azure App Service, AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), Functions, Service Bus/Event Hub, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Storage Accounts, API Management, and Key Vault.
• Implement secure network architecture including VNets, private endpoints, RBAC, and network security controls.
• Optimize workloads for cost, performance, and scalability using autoscaling, caching, and cloud-native design principles.
• Integrate observability using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and distributed tracing.

3) Container Platform - OpenShift

• Containerize services using Docker/Buildah and push hardened images to enterprise registries.
• Deploy applications on Red Hat OpenShift using deployments, routes/ingress, config maps, secrets, HPA, probes, and resource constraints.
• Manage Kubernetes/OpenShift objects using Helm charts, Kustomize, and Operators.
• Apply OpenShift security best practices (non-root containers, SCCs, image policies).

4) DevOps & CI/CD Automation

• Build end-to-end pipelines via Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins for build, test, security scans, containerization, deployment, and observability checks.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform or Bicep for cloud provisioning.
• Automate testing stages: unit, integration, contract, API, and UI (Cypress/Playwright).
• Integrate quality gates: SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, container scanning, and SBOM generation.
• Enable progressive delivery using blue/green, canary, and automated rollback strategies.

5) Non-Functional Requirements , Reliability, Observability & Operational Excellence

• Instrument applications with OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, or Prometheus/Grafana.
• Implement dashboards, alerts, SLIs/SLOs for performance and reliability.
• Conduct root-cause analysis (RCA) for incidents and improve system resilience.
• Enhance performance through caching, async design, circuit breaker patterns, and efficient database access.
• Ensure Non-Functional requirements in terms of retry logic , circuit breakers , latency are adhered

6) Security, Compliance & Governance

• Apply secure development lifecycle (SDLC) controls including static and dynamic code scanning.
• Implement OAuth2.0, OIDC, JWT, certificate-based auth, and secret management (Key Vault, OpenShift Secrets).
• Enforce identity and access controls (RBAC), image signing, and policy-as-code (OPA/Kyverno).
• Ensure compliance with enterprise standards for logging, auditability, encryption, and resilience.

7) Collaboration & Agile Delivery

• Work closely with product owners, architects, UX designers, SRE, and platform teams.
• Participate in sprint ceremonies, backlog grooming, estimations, and retrospectives.
• Conduct peer reviews, drive engineering excellence, and mentor junior developers.

Core Engineering

• 7+ years of Software Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
• Strong coding expertise in one or more: Java/ SprintBoot / Node.js / .NET / Python.
• Performance Test tools LoadRunner , Blazemeter knowledge
• Strond understanding of SDLC, CI/CD/CT
• Functional Test Automation - Java / Selenium / Playwright / Karate and strong understanding of Test Automation , Coverage , Test Execution on Cloud platforms
• Excellent command of JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, and CSS.
• Experience in distributed systems, microservices, and API design.
• Hands-on experience using GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI, or similar LLM-based tools for coding, testing, documentation, and productivity improvements.
• Ability to craft effective prompts (prompt engineering) for code generation, troubleshooting, documentation, and DevOps automation.
• Understanding of responsible AI principles-validating outputs, ensuring correctness, security, and compliance.

Mentoring and Coaching High-Potential Engineers
Key Activities:

• Partner with engineering managers to identify and onboard high-potential engineers (not necessarily current top performers) by January 31.
• Create and implement personalized coaching plans with clear skill improvement goals by February 15.
• Provide structured mentoring focused on both technical development and leadership growth to build long-term capability.
• Ensure alignment with engineering managers and product owners to reinforce coaching objectives and outcomes within the Scrum team.
• Collect feedback from both engineering managers and product owners to validate performance improvements and value added by coaching efforts.
• Track and report progress regularly, ensuring coaching activities are intentional and measurable, with specific actions tied to defined outcomes.

Accelerating Design Readiness to Production Within a Single Sprint
Objective: Deliver MVP-level designs that are production deployment ready within a single sprint, enabling faster development and deployment cycles.
Key Activities:

• Establish and enforce design standards and review processes to minimize rework and delays.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration between design and engineering teams to streamline handoffs and timelines.
• Focus on practical, minimal viable designs that balance speed and quality.
• Incorporate feedback loops to continuously improve processes and identify bottlenecks.
• Track and report progress on design readiness and iteration improvements, ensuring measurable outcomes within the first quarter.

Posting End Date:
24 Jun 2026
*Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.
We Value Equal Opportunity
Wells Fargo is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristic.
Employees support our focus on building strong customer relationships balanced with a strong risk mitigating and compliance-driven culture which firmly establishes those disciplines as critical to the success of our customers and company. They are accountable for execution of all applicable risk programs (Credit, Market, Financial Crimes, Operational, Regulatory Compliance), which includes effectively following and adhering to applicable Wells Fargo policies and procedures, appropriately fulfilling risk and compliance obligations, timely and effective escalation and remediation of issues, and making sound risk decisions. There is emphasis on proactive monitoring, governance, risk identification and escalation, as well as making sound risk decisions commensurate with the business unit's risk appetite and all risk and compliance program requirements.
Candidates applying to job openings posted in Canada: Applications for employment are encouraged from all qualified candidates, including women, persons with disabilities, aboriginal peoples and visible minorities. Accommodation for applicants with disabilities is available upon request in connection with the recruitment process.
Applicants with Disabilities
To request a medical accommodation during the application or interview process, visit Disability Inclusion at Wells Fargo .
Drug and Alcohol Policy
Wells Fargo maintains a drug free workplace. Please see our Drug and Alcohol Policy to learn more.
Wells Fargo Recruitment and Hiring Requirements:
a. Third-Party recordings are prohibited unless authorized by Wells Fargo.
b. Wells Fargo requires you to directly represent your own experiences during the recruiting and hiring process.