Senior Architect, Financial Operations & AI-Driven Automation

TQL; Charlotte (NC); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work environment

AI/automation initiatives

Job summary

TQL in Charlotte, North Carolina is seeking a Principal Engineer for Financial Operations to provide technical leadership across our modernized enterprise platforms, APIs, and automation initiatives.

You will shape the architecture, lead cross‑organizational efforts, and deliver scalable, resilient solutions while mentoring engineers and advancing our modernization roadmap. The role blends hands‑on coding with strategic decisions and close collaboration with stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience designing and delivering large-scale enterprise applications and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across Financial Operations engineering teams, establishing architectural direction and helping teams translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Define and evolve the target architecture for Financial Operations capabilities, including applications, APIs, integrations, workflow/orchestration, data flows, and third‑party platforms.
• Lead modernization efforts that simplify legacy technology, clarify system responsibilities and boundaries, and reduce unnecessary technical complexity.
• Identify opportunities to increase straight‑through processing and automation, reducing manual work and improving operational efficiency.
• Develop proofs of concept and production solutions that combine AI agents with APIs, enterprise data, workflow orchestration, and existing applications, helping move AI from experimentation into measurable operational value.
• Design resilient integration patterns across internal applications, enterprise platforms, financial systems, and third‑party solutions.
• Establish patterns for APIs, services, event‑driven integrations, workflow orchestration, and application architecture that can be reused across teams.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and business stakeholders to ensure technology decisions support both immediate business needs and long‑term strategy.
• Evaluate build‑versus‑buy decisions and help determine when capabilities should be developed internally, delivered by enterprise platforms, or provided by third‑party products.
• Lead architectural design sessions and technical discovery for large, cross‑functional initiatives.
• Remain hands‑on by developing proofs of concept, reviewing critical implementations, solving complex engineering problems, and contributing code where appropriate.
• Identify systemic reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability risks and drive solutions that address root causes instead of symptoms.
• Improve observability and traceability across distributed business processes so teams can more effectively understand the lifecycle of critical Financial Operations transactions.
• Establish engineering standards and reusable patterns that improve consistency, maintainability, security, and delivery speed across teams.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads, helping raise the engineering capability and technical depth of the broader organization.
• Help develop pragmatic modernization roadmaps that allow teams to incrementally move from legacy architectures toward the desired future state without disrupting critical business operations.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architectural design

Distributed systems

Communication

Mentoring

Problem solving

Tools

.NET/C#

REST APIs

SQL Server

TypeScript/React

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

TQL in Charlotte, North Carolina is seeking a Principal Engineer for Financial Operations to provide technical leadership across our modernized enterprise platforms, APIs, and automation initiatives.

You will shape the architecture, lead cross‑organizational efforts, and deliver scalable, resilient solutions while mentoring engineers and advancing our modernization roadmap. The role blends hands‑on coding with strategic decisions and close collaboration with stakeholders.