Principal Engineer II - Digital Banking Platform

Job Title:

Principal Engineer II - Digital Banking Platform

Location:

OH - Columbus

What you'll do:

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a hands-on technical leader across the digital account opening and digital banking technology teams, shaping architecture, engineering standards, and delivery for customer-facing platforms and critical banking journeys. You will design and guide secure, scalable, resilient solutions across web, mobile, API, and integration layers while partnering closely with product, architecture, security, operations, and business stakeholders. This role requires modern senior-level software engineering depth, strong digital banking and onboarding domain experience, and the ability to mentor engineers, improve delivery practices, and drive high-quality outcomes in a regulated financial services environment.

• Lead end-to-end technical design and hands-on delivery of digital account opening and digital banking capabilities, including customer onboarding, authentication, account servicing, transactions, entitlements, and channel integrations.
• Define and evolve scalable application architecture, APIs, event patterns, integration approaches, and engineering standards that support secure, resilient, and high-performing banking experiences.
• Partner with product managers, business analysts, architects, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and operations teams to translate business objectives and regulatory requirements into actionable technical solutions.
• Provide technical leadership across the software development lifecycle, including solution design, estimation, code reviews, testing strategy, CI/CD, release planning, production readiness, and post-production support.
• Build and review high-quality, maintainable, secure code and guide engineers on modern design patterns, domain-driven design, API-first development, cloud-native practices, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Drive engineering excellence through automation, observability, performance optimization, resiliency patterns, secure coding practices, and continuous improvement across development and operational processes.

What you'll need:

• 10+ years of related experience.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science is required; Masters or MBA in related field preferred.
• Strong understanding of financial services controls, compliance expectations, and operational rigor in areas such as auditability, resiliency, change management, and incident response.
• Previous people leadership, technical mentorship, or domain leadership experience preferred.
• Proven experience leading engineering efforts in digital banking, online/mobile banking, or related financial services platforms.
• Proven experience building or integrating digital account opening, onboarding, identity, authentication, and customer lifecycle capabilities in a regulated environment.
• Strong hands-on experience with modern software engineering practices, including object-oriented or JVM-based development, RESTful APIs, microservices, event-driven integration, source control, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing and delivering secure, scalable, highly available applications with strong observability, operational support, and production reliability practices.
• Strong knowledge of system integration patterns, API design, identity and access concepts, data protection, and secure software development in banking or financial services.
• Experience working in Agile delivery models and leading cross-functional teams across product, design, QA, operations, security, and architecture.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts, tradeoffs, risks, and solution direction clearly to both engineering teams and senior business stakeholders.
• Preferred programming language/tooling experience: .NET, Java, Azure DevOps, Azure Cloud Capabilities, Mulesoft, and Groovy.
• May require up to 25% travel.

Benefits you’ll love:
We offer all the important things you'd want — like competitive salaries, an ownership stake in the company, medical and dental insurance, time off, a great 401k matching program, tuition assistance program, an employee volunteer program, and a wellness program. In addition, you’ll have the opportunity to bolster your business knowledge, learning the ins and outs of how successful companies operate and manage their finances, giving you invaluable hands-on experience to help grow your career!

About the company:

Western Alliance Bank, Member FDIC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Alliance Bancorporation. Serving clients nationwide, Western Alliance Bank includes six legacy bank brands — Alliance Association Bank, Alliance Bank of Arizona, Bank of Nevada, Bridge Bank, First Independent Bank and Torrey Pines Bank — that remain part of the company’s heritage, as well as AmeriHome Mortgage, a Western Alliance Bank Company.

Western Alliance Bancorporation is committed to equal employment and will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, sex, color, religion, age, nation origin, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or genetic information. Western Alliance Bancorporation is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process and/or need an alternative method of applying, please email [email protected] or call 602-386-2488.  When contacting us, please provide your contact information and state the nature of your accessibility issue.  We will only respond to inquiries concerning requests that involve a reasonable accommodation in the application process.

© Western Alliance Bancorporation