Principal Software Engineer - Java

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

Empower’s Scheduling team powers the scheduling platform that welcomes new prospects, transitions them into valued clients, and sustains a close relationship between clients and their personal advisors through well‑timed calls and meetings. As a Principal Engineer, you will own the design, evolution, and quality of these mission‑critical micro-services while guiding a cross-functional squad toward cloud-native, test-driven excellence. This role blends deep hands-on coding with technical leadership, helping us modernize legacy code, harden our AWS infrastructure, and set gold-standard engineering practices across the company.

• Design, build, and continuously refactor Java/Spring Boot services that move money and orchestrate scheduling workflows
• Champion test-driven development, clean code, and “definition of done” standards
• Architect cloud-native solutions on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS/FIFO, Kinesis, IAM) and define infrastructure as code in Terraform or CloudFormation
• Mentor engineers by leading design reviews, pairing sessions, and documentation efforts—setting the tone as a self-starter, healthy disruptor, and model of accountability
• Collaborate with Product, SRE, and InfoSec teams to translate ambiguous requirements into secure, performant APIs

• Experience: 10+ years of backend engineering (including 2+ years in a principal or lead role) delivering complex distributed systems at scale
• Leadership & behavior: Proven accountability, follow-through, and habit of documenting and driving adoption of best practices; comfortable challenging the status quo and leading by example
• Java expertise: Mastery of Java and Spring Boot—data structures, concurrency, profiling, and robust testing
• AWS proficiency: Hands-on depth with DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/FIFO, Kinesis, and IAM roles/policies
• Infrastructure as code: Strong with Terraform or CloudFormation for repeatable, auditable environments
• Containers & orchestration: Advanced Dockerfile skills; working knowledge of Kubernetes tuning and operations
• CI/CD & DevSecOps: Jenkins or GitLab CI pipeline design integrating functional tests, static analysis, vulnerability scanning, and performance testing
• Quality mindset: Deep understanding of unit, integration, UI, E2E, and BDD/Cucumber testing plus secure, PII-free logging and performance monitoring (Splunk familiarity is a plus)
• Nice-to-haves: Experience modernizing monoliths to event-driven architectures, advanced Kubernetes (operators/service meshes), and a background in financial-services or other regulated industries

This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job.  The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time.  You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description.  You may be required perform other duties that are not included on this job description.  The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason.

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity.  All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.