Principal Software Engineer - Innovation Studio
$191,000–$249,000 year
On-siteWaterloo, Ontario, Canada
Job Summary
Design, build, and operate critical AI-native systems for customer-facing innovation, risk, and operational efficiency. Lead architectural direction by defining roadmaps, authoring ADRs, and managing the Architecture Review Board. Own end-to-end OKRs and KPIs, driving strategy with product and executive leadership while mentoring engineers across all levels. Respond to executive-attention incidents and critical escalations regardless of time, maintaining hands-on code ownership and setting observability standards. Translate Innovation Studio practices into operational reality and ensure system reliability through transparent runbooks and AI-native knowledge stores.
Required Qualifications
- Experience in at least one of these areas
- Roughly 15–20+ years of relevant engineering experience
- Hands-on credibility and strong work ethic
- Comfort and credibility leading in the area's highest-stakes moments
- A track record owning technical direction for a multi-team organization with real business outcomes, including reliability and quality leadership at scale
- Track record of owning area-scale customer and business outcomes, not just technical ones; product, business, and stakeholder fluency at the level required to partner with executive product leadership
- Architecture leadership evidenced in writing — roadmaps, ADRs, and standards organizations built against
- Experience participating in an Architecture Review Board (or equivalent cross-workstream architecture decision forum) and adopting a standardized ADR practice across a workstream
- Track record of setting the observability and reliability bar for a multi-team organization — teams that shipped observable systems by default because you led them there, and operated in the spirit of SRE
- Demonstrated leadership of AI-native transformation — agentic workflows adopted by teams, not just personal use
- A record of growing engineers at every level — not just Staff-level engineers into architecture ownership, but visible investment in the growth of mid-level, associate, and Senior engineers around you
- Security and regulatory fluency for financial platforms
- Exceptional written and executive communication
- Experience designing and scaling AI-enabled systems or integrating AI capabilities into production systems
- Exposure to AI-native development patterns, including structured inputs/outputs and automation-friendly interfaces
- Familiarity with modern integration and orchestration concepts (e.g., composable services, discoverability, MCP or similar frameworks)
- Candidates should bring deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud architecture, with the ability to shape technical direction and architectural standards across this stack
- The primary technology stack for the Innovation Studio team includes: Node.js/NestJS, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD and observability tooling, along with AI platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini
Desired Qualifications
- Experience in the Payments or Banking domain is preferred
- Experience improving engineering processes and team effectiveness at scale
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline (e.g. Master's or PhD)
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