Principal Software Engineer

How Youll Succeed (responsibilities):

Technical Leadership & Architecture:

• Define and drive the technical direction for major features, systems, and cross-cutting concerns within the Payment Solutions platform; produce high-quality design documents and lead design reviews across the team.
• Make authoritative architectural decisions within the team's domain; shape and evolve platform standards for coding, testing, deployment, and observability.
• Identify, scope, and lead solutions to the team's most complex and ambiguous technical problems including distributed systems challenges, performance at scale, data consistency, and security vulnerabilities.
• Own platform-level concerns: reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and operational excellence across the payment processing stack.
• Evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and patterns; make informed recommendations and drive adoption where they improve outcomes for the team and platform.

Software Development & Ownership:

• Write high-quality, production-ready code for the most complex and high-impact features; set the standard for engineering craft within the team.
• Define and maintain comprehensive testing strategies across the platform unit, integration, end-to-end, performance, and chaos/resiliency testing.
• Own the health and reliability of the payment processing platform; lead incident response, post-mortems, and systemic reliability improvements.
• Establish and govern CI/CD, deployment, and production monitoring standards across the team's services; drive improvements to engineering velocity and operational efficiency.
• Produce and maintain definitive technical documentation, architecture decision records (ADRs), and platform runbooks.

Payment Solutions Domain Expertise:

• Serve as the team's deepest technical authority on payment processing systems transaction lifecycle, settlement, reconciliation, fraud detection, and compliance requirements.
• Lead the architecture and delivery of secure, PCI-DSS-compliant payment systems; ensure platform-wide adherence to payment industry standards (PCI-DSS, PSD2, SWIFT, VISA/Mastercard network requirements as applicable).
• Drive payment flow optimization at scale performance, resilience, correctness under high volume, and graceful degradation.
• Lead evaluation and integration of third-party payment gateways, processors, and financial institutions; own critical vendor relationships from a technical perspective.
• Anticipate regulatory and compliance changes; proactively influence platform design to accommodate evolving requirements.

AI & Intelligent Systems:

• Lead the technical strategy for integrating AI/ML capabilities into the payment platform fraud detection, anomaly detection, risk scoring, and predictive analytics.
• Define standards for how AI/ML models are evaluated, validated, deployed, and monitored in production payment environments.
• Drive adoption of AI-powered developer tooling across the team; assess and integrate LLM-based capabilities (code generation, automated testing, documentation) into engineering workflows.
• Act as the team's AI/ML technical authority; guide SDE1 and SDE2 engineers in evaluating, implementing, and operating AI capabilities responsibly and safely.

Mentorship & Team Growth:

• Actively mentor and develop SDE1 (L5) and SDE2 (L6) engineers; invest meaningfully in their technical growth, career progression, and engineering judgment.
• Conduct deep, high-value code reviews that teach architectural thinking, not just correctness.
• Contribute to hiring participate in technical interviews, define evaluation criteria, and help build a strong engineering team.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning within the team.
• Identify skill gaps on the team and develop plans (pairing, documentation, workshops) to address them.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Influence:

• Represent the Payment Solutions team in cross-functional and cross-team technical discussions; ensure architectural consistency across ASG's engineering landscape.
• Collaborate with Product Management and business stakeholders to translate complex business problems into sound technical strategy; provide credible technical input to product roadmap decisions.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager to align technical direction with team health, capacity, and business priorities.
• Influence engineering practices beyond the immediate team; share learnings, tooling, and patterns with peer teams within ASG.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS:

• Partner with the Engineering Manager to align technical strategy, team capacity, and delivery commitments; serve as the technical counterpart in planning and prioritization.
• Engage with Senior SDEs and Principal Engineers on platform-wide and org-level architectural alignment; receive strategic direction and contribute to cross-cutting initiatives.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for Product Management on complex features, technical feasibility, and platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with QA leads and DevOps/Platform teams to define platform-wide quality standards, deployment practices, and observability strategy.
• Lead engagement with external vendors and third-party payment processors on critical integration decisions, escalations, and technical roadmap alignment.
• Actively mentor SDE1 and SDE2 engineers, investing in their growth through structured coaching, pairing, and design guidance.

COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS/RESPONSIBILITIES:

As an employee of CIBC, the incumbent must comply with all applicable CIBC and Line of Business policies, standards, guidelines and controls.

Experience: 7+ years of experience:

Who You Are (skills/qualifications):

Must Have Skills:

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, with substantial depth in backend and distributed systems engineering.
• Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern programming language (Python, Java, C#, Go, or similar); demonstrable ability to work across languages and adapt rapidly to new technology contexts.
• Expert-level knowledge of relational and NoSQL data stores (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis); experience with query optimization, schema design for high-throughput systems, and data migration strategies.
• Proven experience designing and governing RESTful and event-driven APIs at platform scale; experience with API versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation strategies.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP); experience with multi-region, high-availability, and cost-optimized designs.
• Hands-on experience owning and evolving CI/CD platforms, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags), and production observability (tracing, metrics, alerting).
• Strong experience with containerization and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in production environments.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems design consistency models, fault tolerance, event-driven architecture, microservices, and service mesh patterns.
• Demonstrated record of leading end-to-end delivery of complex, high-impact technical initiatives from ambiguous requirements through production at scale.
• Demonstrated performance engineering expertise profiling, load testing, capacity planning, and tuning at scale.
• Security engineering depth threat modelling, secure design reviews, knowledge of relevant vulnerability classes, and experience with regulated/compliant systems.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers effectively and grow technical capability within a team.
• Experience with payment processing systems, financial transactions, or financial services domain; solid understanding of transaction lifecycle, settlement, reconciliation, and compliance requirements.
• Working knowledge of PCI-DSS and relevant payment industry security standards; experience ensuring platform compliance.
• Strong ability to integrate AI/ML capabilities into production systems; able to define standards and evaluate AI components for production readiness, safety, and risk in a payments context.

Good to have Skills:

• Experience with foreign exchange systems, capital markets infrastructure, or complex financial instrument processing.
• Hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating ML models (fraud detection, risk scoring, anomaly detection) in production payment environments.
• Experience with LLM integration patterns, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, or AI agent frameworks at production scale.
• Advanced knowledge of message streaming and event sourcing patterns (Kafka, Flink, event-driven architecture at scale).
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical publications, or conference presentations.
• Experience in a formal technical lead or staff engineer capacity.