Principal Engineer, Technology

Raymondjames; Saint Petersburg (FL); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Raymond James in Saint Petersburg, FL seeks a Principal Engineer to own and lead the architecture and development of enterprise-scale on-prem and cloud applications. This hands-on technical leader writes code, mentors engineers, and guides POCs to validate technologies. The core team collaborates across Wealth Management Technology in a hybrid setup from St.

Petersburg, FL. The ideal candidate excels in Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Kafka, Spark, and CI/CD, and communicates complex trade-offs to

Qualifications

• Proven track record owning and leading technical architecture for enterprise-scale systems.
• Hands-on development in Java, Python, and cloud-native environments.
• Strong communication to explain architectural decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with data platforms, ETL/ELT pipelines, and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical architecture for on-prem and cloud environments.
• Write production-grade code and set engineering standards.
• Lead POCs to validate new technologies and patterns.
• Design cloud-native microservices and REST APIs.
• Mentor engineers and drive observability and reliability improvements.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Microservices

ORM/Hibernate

Python

AWS (EKS, MSK, S3, EMR, Redshift, Glue

MWAA/Airflow

IAM & CloudWatch

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Apache Kafka/Confluent Kafka

Spark

ETL/ELT

SQL/Oracle

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Job description

Job Description Summary

Highly specialized expert developing software applications, in entirety or in part, that have a big impact on business for a large organization.

Job Description

This position will follow our hybrid work model, we expect the selected candidate to be in office 3 days a week at one of the following office locations: St. Petersburg, FL;

Summary:

As part of the Wealth Management technology team, the Principal Engineer will own and lead the technical architecture and development of our on-premises and cloud applications and data platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: the Principal Engineer sets technical direction, writes code alongside the team, leads proofs of concept (POCs) to validate new technologies and approaches, and mentors senior and junior engineers. As a Fortune 500 company, we offer the opportunity to shape enterprise-scale solutions in a collaborative and encouraging environment. The core team is based out of our headquarters in St. Petersburg, FL (Hybrid).

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer with strong technical leadership, analytical, and problem-solving skills. The candidate should be able to operate effectively in a fast-paced enterprise technology environment and support both strategic development initiatives and ongoing production stability. The ideal candidate is a passionate, hands-on technologist who leads by example and exhibits excellent English written and oral communication skills, allowing them to clearly convey complex technical concepts, architectural decisions, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities:

• Own and lead the end-to-end technical architecture, design, and development of scalable, highly available, and secure solutions across on-premises and external cloud environments.
• Stay hands-on in coding and development: write high-quality, production-ready code alongside the team, conduct code and design reviews, and establish engineering standards and best practices.
• Lead POCs and prototypes with the team to validate new technologies and design approaches, and turn successful outcomes into reusable solution patterns and reference architectures.
• Develop a deep understanding of end-to-end data, application, and service requirements, and translate them into solution designs and technical roadmaps that support strategic development initiatives.
• Architect and build cloud-native microservices and REST APIs, Kafka-based event-driven systems, and scalable ETL/ELT data pipelines using Spark and AWS data services.
• Design, engineer, and build core platform capabilities, including networking, security, logging, monitoring, and persistent storage.
• Ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements for scalability, resiliency, security, performance, high availability, and disaster recovery, and proactively plan capacity, monitoring, and scaling of platforms and applications.
• Support ongoing production stability by leading the resolution of complex production issues, performing root cause analysis, and driving long-term fixes and observability improvements.
• Research, evaluate, and recommend innovative technologies, tools, and frameworks for private and public cloud environments, weighing cost, performance, and security while adhering to technical and budgetary constraints.
• Drive CI/CD, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) practices to improve delivery speed, quality, and consistency.
• Provide technical direction and mentorship to senior and junior engineers, fostering a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Lead technical planning and execution within the Agile or Waterfall development lifecycle, including daily stand-ups, biweekly sprint planning, estimation, and design reviews.
• Collaborate with business partners, product owners, technology teams, vendors, and support teams to align on requirements, priorities, and solutions, and communicate across departments to solve problems.
• Occasionally work a non-standard shift including nights and/or weekends and/or have on-call responsibilities.
• Performs other duties and responsibilities as assigned.

Required Skills:

• Proven track record of owning and leading technical architecture and hands-on development for enterprise-scale systems, including leading POCs and guiding solutions from concept to production.
• Strong experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, ORM/Hibernate, and distributed systems.
• Experience with Python programming.
• Strong experience with AWS services such as EKS, MSK, S3, EMR, Redshift, Glue, MWAA/Airflow, IAM, and CloudWatch.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native architecture, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• Experience with Apache Kafka/Confluent Kafka and event-driven architectures.
• Experience building scalable data pipelines, ETL/ELT solutions, Spark-based processing, and distributed data platforms.
• Experience with Oracle, Redshift, SQL, or similar da