Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Responsible for writing code at the expert level in multiple languages while driving enterprise-level architecture, technical strategy, and scalable engineering solutions across mobile, backend services, cloud platforms, AKS, databases, security, and the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Serves as a subject matter expert and senior technical leader, setting standards across multiple teams, influencing architectural direction, and mentoring engineers across Technology. This role balances business, operational, risk, and engineering priorities while making technical decisions with long-term enterprise impact.

Primary Responsibilities

• Accountable for the overall code change and review process to ensure high quality, process optimization, and adherence to enterprise engineering standards.
• Apply and analyze metrics across teams to identify opportunities for SDLC process improvement, peer reviews, engineering quality, and operational maturity.
• Author organized, clean, efficient, and secure source code at the expert level in a minimum of two programming languages, with the ability to build shared libraries and reusable frameworks.
• Coach team members on appropriate data structures, algorithms, design patterns, and engineering practices to solve complex business and technical problems.
• Define strategic technology direction, target-state architectures, and scalable solution designs across multiple technical domains.
• Design, review, and approve system architecture; ensure cross-domain alignment, identify gaps and efficiencies, and drive strategic direction while adhering to architectural design patterns.
• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs, technical risks, resiliency needs, security implications, and long-term operational impact.
• Establish and influence enterprise architecture standards, including domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, microservices, service decomposition, API-first design, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Guide platform architecture decisions across native mobile engineering, backend services, cloud platforms, AKS, databases, security, and DevOps.
• Establish reusable mobile frameworks and ensure alignment between mobile architecture and backend service contracts.
• Design highly scalable service ecosystems using modern backend engineering practices, including REST APIs, event streaming, asynchronous messaging patterns, API gateways, and service reliability standards.
• Define cloud adoption strategy and guide application modernization efforts across Azure platforms, including identity, security, networking, storage, monitoring, application services, and DevOps.
• Establish AKS deployment standards, platform governance, cluster security, namespace strategy, workload identity, scaling practices, and cloud-native operating models.
• Design enterprise data strategies and integration standards while preventing data architecture fragmentation across relational, NoSQL, and cloud-based database platforms.
• Promote engineering excellence through CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, release automation, deployment strategies, feature flags, and improved developer experience.
• Define reliability, observability, and production readiness standards, including distributed tracing, logging, metrics, performance engineering, capacity planning, incident management, SRE principles, and service-level objectives.
• Review security architecture and embed security, compliance, risk reduction, threat modeling, secrets management, OAuth2, OIDC, Azure AD/Entra, and Zero Trust principles early in the design process.
• Contribute to domain improvement of development operations, coding practices, engineering strategy, and long-term technology roadmaps.
• Contribute to and review technical roadmaps that address strategic requirements, technical debt, corporate standards, regulatory expectations, and industry best practices.
• Support rollout of engineering capabilities for specific domains and ensure all regulatory requirements are met.
• Lead discussions with business and technical stakeholders, proactively engaging other groups on technical and architectural opportunities related to their applications.
• Regularly participate in and present at peer group committees, capturing opportunities for improvement and working with senior leadership to act on appropriate recommendations.
• Drive implementation adherence and recommend patterns and practices related to performance testing, resiliency, observability, and optimization within the domain.
• Drive behavioral change with product owners, architects, and senior leaders in the overall requirements and story ingestion process within the domain.
• Influence multiple engineering organizations without direct authority, aligning teams across domains and serving as a final technical escalation point when needed.
• Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers and elevate the technical capabilities of engineers across teams.
• Partner with security, architecture, product, risk, infrastructure, and technology leadership to ensure solutions meet business, operational, engineering, and regulatory needs.
• Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies, and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite. Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.
• Promote an environment that supports a culture of belonging and reflects the M&T Bank brand.
• Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators, as applicable.
• Complete other related duties as assigned.

Scope of Responsibilities

This role serves as a senior technical leader responsible for influencing architecture, engineering standards, and technical strategy across multiple teams and domains. The Principal Engineer is expected to design solutions that span mobile, APIs, cloud platforms, AKS, databases, reliability, and security while balancing business, risk, operational, and engineering considerations.

Supervisory/Managerial Responsibilities

No supervisory responsibilities.

Education and Experience Required

• Associate’s degree and a minimum of 9 years’ systems analysis and/ or application development work experience or Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 7 years' systems analysis and/ or application development work experience. In lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 11 years’ education and/or relevant work experience, including a minimum of 7 years’ systems analysis and/ or application development work experience.

• Expert proficiency in a minimum of 1 relevant programming language and advanced proficiency in a minimum of 1 additional relevant programming language.
• Expert-level experience designing, coding, reviewing, and implementing enterprise-scale application solutions.
• Experience with solution architecture, systems design, and enterprise architecture patterns.
• Experience with domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, microservices architecture, service decomposition strategies, API-first design, and distributed systems design.
• Experience designing scalable, resilient, highly available systems, including disaster recovery considerations.
• Experience with mobile engineering concepts and architecture patterns, including native iOS, native Android, MVVM, Clean Architecture, mobile security, authentication, authorization, offline-first patterns, observability, telemetry, and store deployment processes.
• Experience with backend services engineering, including Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, REST APIs, gRPC, event streaming, asynchronous messaging patterns, and API gateway concepts.
• Experience with cloud architecture and Azure platform engineering, including Azure networking, identity, security, Key Vault, App Services, Functions, Storage, Monitor, and Azure DevOps.
• Experience with Kubernetes and AKS, including cluster design, containerization, Helm, ingress controllers, service mesh concepts, cluster security, namespace strategy, workload identity, and horizontal and vertical scaling.
• Experience with relational databases, including SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, as well as NoSQL databases, data modeling, query optimization, performance tuning, data governance, migration strategies, and transaction management.
• Experience with DevOps and platform engineering practices, including CI/CD pipelines, GitLab, Azure DevOps, infrastructure as code, Terraform, automated testing, release automation, deployment strategies, and feature flags.
• Experience with reliability, observability, and production excellence practices, including distributed tracing, metrics platforms, logging strategies, performance engineering, capacity planning, incident management, SRE principles, and chaos engineering concepts.
• Experience with security and risk management concepts, including OAuth2, OIDC, Azure AD/Entra, Zero Trust principles, threat modeling, secure coding practices, secrets management, and regulatory compliance.
• Experience influencing technical direction, architecture governance, technology roadmaps, and cross-functional engineering decisions across multiple teams.

Education and Experience Preferred

• GraphQL experience.
• Istio or service mesh experience.
• Expert analytical skills specific to application development.
• Experience working in a team environment.
• Ability to work autonomously.
• Ability to multitask on multiple complex projects.
• Strong organizational skills.
• Strong time management skills.
• Advanced verbal and written communication skills with the ability to influence others.
• Experience driving project milestones and delivery dates across multiple teams.
• Proven experience leading a project, initiative, architecture strategy, or enterprise engineering standard.
• Experience partnering with and presenting to multiple senior stakeholders within technology and business departments.
• Proven subject matter expert of required technical skill set.
• Experience building consensus across product owners, architects, engineers, security partners, infrastructure teams, and senior leaders.
• Experience mentoring Senior and Staff Engineers.
• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs, technology risks, vendor solutions, and long-term platform decisions.
• Experience defining technical standards used across multiple teams or engineering organizations.