Principal Engineer (Bill Payments)

Nordea; Helsinki; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working model

Job summary

Nordea is seeking an experienced Principal Engineer to shape the future of Nordic payment services, providing technical leadership and architecture across critical bill payments initiatives. You will drive modernisation through API-first, microservices, and cloud-native approaches while promoting AI-assisted software engineering practices.

The role spans Finland and Poland, with hybrid work options and a strong focus on resilience and security in high-availability payment systems.

Qualifications

• Strong Java 21+ expertise and modern features
• Spring Boot enterprise apps experience
• Distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant systems
• Relational DBs including Oracle or PostgreSQL
• RESTful APIs and enterprise integration patterns
• Microservices with cloud-native designs
• CI/CD, containers, DevOps practices
• Fluent English communication

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and design authority across Bill Payments Agile Release Train.
• Drive solution design for strategic payment and collection services.
• Lead modernization: API-first, microservices, event-driven, cloud-native.
• Promote AI-assisted software engineering adoption.
• Set engineering standards and best practices.
• Collaborate with architects, product owners, stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and uplift capabilities.
• Ensure resilience, performance, observability, security.

Skills

Java 21+

Spring Boot

Distributed systems

Microservices

RESTful APIs

CI/CD

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

AI in software

Engineering leadership

Mentoring

English fluency

Tools

Oracle

PostgreSQL

Docker

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Job ID: 5739Welcome to Group Technology, where we pride ourselves on engineering solutions and direct Nordea’s transformation by providing a holistic technological view and structured understanding of the bank, and its surrounding environment to enable the Customer Vision and the Business Strategy. We are looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to help shape the future of Nordic payment services. If you're passionate about technology leadership, modern software engineering and building resilient solutions at scale, this role offers a unique opportunity to deliver meaningful impact while influencing the technical direction of critical payment services used every day across the Nordic region. Nordea is a place where traditions meet tomorrow. We're not just a bank, we're a tech employer on a mission to evolve finance securely and responsibly. Together, we impact millions of people’s daily lives by ensuring they can access our solutions anytime, anywhere, while safeguarding their personal data and wealth. Join us in making an impact on the banking industry.

About Our Team

Welcome to the Retail & Mobile Payments Service Domain. Our Service Domain, Retail & Mobile Payments, plays a key role in meeting these expectations by delivering mobile payments, bill payment services and digital wallet solutions across the Nordics. Together, we enable trusted, high-quality payment experiences for millions of customers and businesses.

What You'll Be Doing

• Providing technical leadership and acting as a design authority across the Bill Payments Agile Release Train.
• Driving solution design and guiding implementation for strategic payment and collection services initiatives.
• Leading modernisation efforts, including API-first solutions, microservices, event-driven architectures and cloud-native engineering practices.
• Supporting adoption of AI-assisted software engineering and helping engineering teams leverage new tools and capabilities effectively.
• Establishing and promoting engineering standards, design principles and best practices.
• Collaborating closely with architects, engineers, product owners and business stakeholders to ensure solutions are resilient, scalable and aligned with strategic objectives.
• Mentoring engineers and contributing to capability uplift across teams.
• Providing hands‑on technical guidance for complex engineering challenges and critical design decisions.
• Driving improvements in resilience, performance, observability, security and operational excellence.

This role is located in Helsinki, Finland or Tricity, Poland.

Who You Are

At Nordea, we value collaboration, ownership, passion and courage. These qualities are essential as we continue modernising critical payment capabilities and serving millions of customers across the Nordics.

To succeed in this role, we believe you:

• Are an experienced software engineer with a passion for solving complex technical problems.
• Enjoy combining strategic thinking with hands‑on engineering leadership.
• Have the ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Are naturally curious about emerging technologies and AI‑enabled ways of working.
• Enjoy mentoring others and helping engineering organization’s raise their technical capabilities.
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Thrive in a collaborative, cross‑functional and continuously evolving environment.

Your experience and background

Required

• Strong expertise in Java 21 or above, with deep understanding of modern Java features, patterns and development practices.
• Extensive experience developing enterprise‑grade applications using Spring Boot.
• Proven experience designing and implementing distributed systems with a focus on scalability, resilience and fault tolerance.
• Strong proficiency with relational database technologies, including Oracle and/or PostgreSQL.
• Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs, messaging solutions and enterprise integration patterns.
• Hands‑on experience with microservices‑based architectures and modern software design approaches.
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices, containerisation technologies and DevOps ways of working.
• Experience influencing technical direction and driving solution outcomes across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Experience in rolling out strategic goals into technical roadmaps.
• Fluent English, both written and spoken.

Good to have

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Experience with event‑driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, CQRS or event sourcing.
• Understanding of payment systems, ISO 20022 standards and financial services technologies.
• Experience working with security, authentication and regulatory requirements in modern digital platforms.
• Knowledge of observability, monitoring and performance optimisation practices.
• Familiarity with API management platforms and service mesh technologies.

What Makes This Role Unique

This is an opportunity to influence both technology and engineering culture within one of the Nordics' largest payment environments. You will work on highly strategic initiatives at the heart of Nordea's payment ecosystem, help shape the adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices, and contribute directly to the modernisation of critical payment and collection services used by millions of customers. The role combines the breadth of architecture with the depth and impact of hands‑on engineering leadership. At Nordea, we know that an inclusive workplace is a sustainable workplace. We deeply believe that our diverse backgrounds, experiences, characteristics and traits make us better at serving customers and communities. So please come as you are.

What We Offer

Collaboration. Ownership. Passion. Courage. These are the values that guide us in how we work and how we make decisions – and that we imagine you share with us. People are driven by many different factors. For some, it’s to take their career to the next level. For others, it’s to break new ground within their area of expertise – in other words, with us, you will always move forward. A culture that fosters performance and growth in one of the largest Nordic banks, offering various opportunities to evolve, develop and learn from brilliant colleagues with diverse backgrounds in a vibrant working environment. Hybrid working model – we believe in the value of bringing people together and at the same time we embrace the freedom of flexibility. Diversity and inclusion are a natural part of our daily work. We know that an inclusive workplace is a sustainable one. We genuinely believe that our diverse backgrounds, experiences, characteristics and traits make us stronger together. Every day we strive to find new ways to improve diversity and inclusion within our community e.g. we have signed the European Diversity Charters in the countries where we operate to show our commitment and engage with others to continue learning and improving.

Studies show that members of underrepresented communities don’t apply for jobs unless they tick all the qualification boxes. If this is part of why you hesitate to apply, we would like you to reconsider and give it a chance. Maybe your profile fits our needs much better than you think.

Only for candidates in Finland: A security clearance will be performed for the person selected for this position.

Only for candidates in Poland: Please include permit for processing personal data in CV as following: In accordance with art. 6 (1) a and b. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) hereinafter ‘GDPR’. I agree to have: my personal data, education and employment history proceeded for the purposes of current and future recruitment processes in Nordea Bank Abp. The administrator of your personal data is: Nordea Bank Abp operating in Poland through its Branch, address: Aleja Edwarda Rydza Śmiglego 20, 93-281 Łodź. Your personal data will be processed for the recruitment processes in Nordea Bank Abp. You have a right to access your personal data, right to rectify and right to delete. Disclosing the personal data in the scope specified by the provisions of Polish Labour Code from 26 June 1974 and executive acts are mandatory. Providing personal data is necessary to conduct the recruitment processes. The request for the deletion of your personal data means resignation from further participation in recruitment processes and causes the immediate removal of your application. Detailed information concerning processing of your personal data can be found at: https://www.nordea.com/en/doc/nordea-privacy-policy-for-applicants.pdf

We reserve the right to reply only to selected applications.