Lead Consultant - Software Engineering

Why Principal

At Principal, we offer a setting where your expertise and passion for security can thrive. If you are ready to join a positive group committed to quality and creativity, we want to connect with you! Our culture promotes innovation, collaboration, and excellence, making it the ideal environment for ambitious professionals to excel.

Our Engineering Culture

In our Agile/Lean DevOps environment, we've fostered a culture of innovation and experimentation across our development teams. As a customer-focused organization, we work closely with our end users and product owners to grasp and quickly address emerging business needs. Collaboration is embedded in every part of our work – from the products we build to the outstanding service we provide. We are driven by the belief that diversity of thought, background, and perspective is crucial to crafting the highest-quality products and experiences for our customers. Join us and become part of a highly ambitious team committed to delivering outstanding solutions!

As a Lead Consultant - Software Engineering at Principal Financial Group, you will play a meaningful role in driving the success of our technology initiatives. This position offers you the chance to showcase your technical leadership, solve complex problems, and contribute to the development of world-class software solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical thought leadership while remaining hands-on with coding and system building.
• Build and implement scalable, high-performance software solutions.
• Collaborate with multi-functional teams to define and achieve project goals.
• Lead the technical exploration, testing, and deployment of innovative solutions.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering capabilities to improve software development outcomes.
• Ensure code quality and maintainability through rigorous testing and alignment to established guidelines.
• Communicate effectively with engineering and technology collaborators to influence and guide technical decisions.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience solving complex enterprise technology problems.
• Strong hands-on Java programming skills – mandatory.
• Expertise in system build and software architecture.
• Deep understanding of APIs, integration patterns, and distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including building patterns, testing, code quality, and maintainability.
• Demonstrable experience applying AI-assisted engineering capabilities.
• Strong build thinking and structured problem-solving capabilities.
• Ability to independently approach loosely defined problems and guide them through technical exploration, testing, and implementation.
• Good communication and influencing skills across engineering and technology collaborators.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with DevOps / DevSecOps and CI/CD.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code.
• Understanding of enterprise release management practices.
• Experience with Snowflake integration.
• Cloud-native application engineering experience.
• Familiarity with developing enterprise engineering frameworks, accelerators, or reusable capabilities.
• Claude CCA certification or equivalent exposure to modern AI-assisted engineering tools.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, or related fields, or equivalent professional experience (B.E. / B.Tech / M.S. / M.Tech / MCA).