Principal Software Engineer (Java, Event-Driven)

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions. Join our world-class team today and fulfill your career potential!

The Opportunity “As a Principal Engineer, you will lead one of the crucial foundational services powering the FICO Platform. You'll guide and mentor a team of software developers while driving architectural decisions and technical strategy for our cloud-native SaaS platform. In this hands-on leader role, you'll deliver high-impact software solutions while championing engineering excellence. You'll be accountable for your scrum team's success, responsible for critical technical decisions, defining architectural standards, and ensuring best practices across the development lifecycle. You'll balance technical leadership, from sprint planning and code design to mentoring developers with strategic responsibilities including roadmap planning, dependency management, and cross-functional collaboration.” - VP, Software Engineering

What You'll Contribute

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support capabilities for a world-class enterprise platform.
• Create scalable, high-performance microservices with exceptional availability, interoperability, and reliability.
• Contribute architectural designs and technical proof-of-concepts while adhering to established standards and architectural guidance.
• Foster software development best practices including pair programming, code formatting standards, secure coding practices, and peer code reviews.
• Champion and implement process improvements across the development lifecycle.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentor team members to enhance their technical capabilities.
• Take accountability for scrum team success and delivery outcomes.
• Execute scrum processes while maintaining focus on technical excellence.
• Collaborate with senior engineers and product management to create epics and user stories, defining technical acceptance criteria.
• Work with enterprise architectural models and distributed software design patterns.
• Serve as a technical expert, mentoring junior engineers and elevating quality standards.
• Navigate ambiguity and moderate complexity while proactively identifying and resolving issues.
• Share ownership of quality assurance, test automation, continuous integration/delivery, and production operations.
• Escalate challenges and risks promptly to ensure timely resolution.

What We're Seeking

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field, plus 12+ years of relevant experience.
• Deep expertise in Java; proficiency in Python/Go is advantageous.
• Strong backend/server-side development experience.
• Proven experience with large-scale platform engineering and distributed systems.
• Demonstrated leadership of technical initiatives with a track record of successful delivery despite complex technical challenges, organizational dynamics, and ambiguity.
• Experience with Spring Framework, Spring Boot Microservices, and Spring Cloud Stream preferred.
• Proficiency with gRPC services.
• Experience with event-driven architecture and messaging systems (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ). Preferable experience working with Dapr.
• Full-stack development experience with JavaScript and Angular is beneficial.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) experience required; Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) experience preferred.
• AWS certifications (Cloud Practitioner, Developer, Solutions Architect) are advantageous.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, SQL, and object-relational mapping (Hibernate).
• Demonstrated expertise in unit testing, functional testing, automated regression testing, and test integration.
• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with Helm, Amazon EKS/OpenShift, and Terraform for cloud provisioning preferred.
• Proficiency with Git, Maven, Gradle, and CI/CD tools.
• Strong understanding of Scrum methodology.
• Ability to collaborate effectively within geographically distributed teams.

Our Offer to You

• An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values: Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.
• The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.
• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.
• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.
• The targeted base pay range for this role is: $146,000 to $229,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.

Why Make a Move to FICO? At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics. You’ll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.

FICO makes a real difference in the way businesses operate worldwide:

• Credit Scoring — FICO® Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.
• Fraud Detection and Security — 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.
• Lending — 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.

Global trends toward digital transformation have created tremendous demand for FICO’s solutions, placing us among the world’s top 100 software companies by revenue. We help many of the world’s largest banks, insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers and other firms reach a new level of success. Our success is dependent on really talented people – just like you – who thrive on the collaboration and innovation that’s nurtured by a diverse and inclusive environment. We’ll provide the support you need, while ensuring you have the freedom to develop your skills and grow your career. Join FICO and help change the way business thinks!

Learn more about how you can fulfil your potential at www.fico.com/Careers

FICO promotes a culture of inclusion and seeks to attract a diverse set of candidates for each job opportunity. We are an equal employment opportunity employer and we’re proud to offer employment and advancement opportunities to all candidates without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. Research has shown that women and candidates from underrepresented communities may not apply for an opportunity if they don’t meet all stated qualifications. While our qualifications are clearly related to role success, each candidate’s profile is unique and strengths in certain skill and/or experience areas can be equally effective. If you believe you have many, but not necessarily all, of the stated qualifications we encourage you to apply.

Information submitted with your application is subject to the FICO Privacy policy at https://www.fico.com/en/privacy\-policy