Lead Principal Application Software Engineer

Adheres to and improves execution of all phases of the application software development lifecycle; coaches engineers across teams or units to drive application-focused improvements. Acts as a subject matter expert within the organization to develop and guide new application features and enhancements following design specifications, ensuring accessibility, and develops documents to clarify application design and code. Leads process, architecture, and code reviews across application projects and/or products/services to drive improvements. Utilizes modern/emerging technologies to conduct debugging and troubleshooting to identify and fix highly complex application issues. Resolves and may troubleshoot highly complex and systemic issues requiring innovation related to application programming interface (API) functionality, integration, and service-to-service interactions. Leads task and project initiatives for the design and development of application software, systems, and services. Defines project or design scope; reviews, influences, and approves scope and design recommendations for application components and services. Collaborates with stakeholders internally and externally to lead efforts to understand customer use cases, root causes, and mitigations to align and explain rationale behind application solutions. Must provide expert technical guidance and support to customers regarding application-related issues to mitigate recurrence. Collaborates with the security team and leadership teams to establish, follow, and improve upon application development practices, secure coding standards, and code quality, providing coaching to less experienced team members. Leads project initiatives for periodic maintenance and testing operations for application systems that require upgrading or patching (e.g., for critical vulnerabilities).

Career Level - IC5

Key Responsibilities
Application Software Development:

• Architects and delivers multi-team features and modernization initiatives with clear, organization-level KPIs.

• Establishes global production-readiness standards (SLOs, error budgets, incident tooling) and drives adoption.

• Diagnoses and resolves high-severity, multi-system failures; creates systemic reliability improvements across apps/OCI.

• Harmonizes QA strategy across teams (test pyramids, non-functional testing) to ensure consistent app quality.

• Makes significant architectural decisions; leads migrations and pattern adoptions with deprecation plans.

• Creates scalable blueprints and reference implementations adopted by multiple teams.

• Defines cross-team API governance and dependency management frameworks.

• Shapes prioritization across multiple teams using data from field/customer, telemetry, and live-site signals.

• Institutionalizes feedback loops into planning cadences; measures impact.

• Mentors Staff engineers; partners with Product and Design to balance customer value and technical strategy.

Software Development and Coding - Design, Testing, and Optimization:

• Leads project initiatives to design software solutions and identify and analyze requirements. Writes and defines foundational code for new projects or prototypes.

• Adheres to and improves execution of all phases of the software development lifecycle; coaches engineers across teams or units to drive improvements.

• Acts as a subject matter expert within the organization to develop and guide new software features and enhancements following design specifications, ensuring accessibility, and develops documents to clarify software design and code.

• Leads process, architecture, and code reviews across projects and/or products/services to drive improvements.

• Utilizes modern/emerging technologies to conduct debugging and troubleshooting to identify and fix highly complex software issues.

• Leads strategic initiatives to optimize software testing (e.g., functional and non-functional), quality assurance processes, software error logging, monitoring, and observability for effective debugging.

• Encourages innovation, research, and relevant industry practices to optimize performance across products and domains.

• Resolves and may troubleshoot highly complex and systematic issues requiring innovation related to application programming interface (API) functionality and integration.

• Implements innovative API versioning, lifecycle, and interoperability strategies.

Software Architecture - Software System Structural Design:

• Leads task and project initiatives for the design and development of software, systems, and services. Defines project or design scope; reviews, influences, and approves scope and design recommendations.

• Provides technical guidance, domain expertise, and coaching in software architecture decisions and best practices that drive key organizational decisions, including industry standards and competitive considerations, providing mentorship and coaching for small teams and peers and contributing to both individual and team development across line of business/function.

• Utilizes innovative methods to conduct highly complex periodic reviews and ensures adherence to architectural standards.

• Collaborates with stakeholders across lines of business and externally, to align and build software architecture with business and/or customer goals and priorities.

• Implements innovative performance optimization and scalability strategies in software design.

• Conducts regular technology research and evaluation for architectural enhancements and translates into decisions and plans that can have a major impact on the organization.

Issue/Defect Collaboration - Software Products Support:

• Collaborates with stakeholders internally and externally to lead efforts to understand customer issues, root causes, and mitigation to align and explain rationale behind solutions.

• Must provide expert technical guidance and support to customers regarding customer-reported issues to mitigate recurrence.

• Acts as an advisor to advocate for customers' interests and suggests product enhancements and solutions based on feedback.

• Networks across lines of business to ensure customer satisfaction through timely resolution of issues and effective communication.

• Guides implementation of strategic solutions for customer issue and/or defect handling and training processes.

• Investigates and troubleshoots the most complex and broadly reaching product maintenance issues to ensure customer agreement on short- and long-term solutions (e.g., future enhancements).

Practices and Standards Compliance - Security and Compliance:

• Collaborates with the security team and leadership teams to establish, follow, and improve upon development practices and coding standards, providing coaching to less experienced team members.

• Participates in peer review processes and provides technical leadership with initiatives to ensure quality and adherence to broad acceptance criteria during development.

• Demonstrates, contributes to, and shares deep expertise of industry best practices and their application to software development processes.

• Implements highly complex secure software development practices/solutions requiring modern/emerging innovation to prevent security vulnerabilities, leveraging automated solutions to augment the manual review process.

Development Operations - System Maintenance:

• Leads project initiatives for periodic maintenance and testing operations for systems that require upgrading or patching (e.g., for critical vulnerabilities).

• Acts as subject matter expert to drive improvements, ensures automation, testing, and debugging of systems to ensure service/product availability, health, support, and reliability.

Core Responsibilities
Planning & Execution:

• Manages and provides direction on timelines, deliverables, and budgets when applicable for critical high-impact projects or initiatives that impact the line of business, ensuring timely completion and adherence to requirements.

• Anticipates and plans for shifts in resources or timelines based on changing business priorities, ensuring optimal outcomes.

Collaboration & Partnership:

• Influences cross-functional leaders and external stakeholders to gain alignment on strategic objectives.

• Fosters partnerships with key business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers, identifying opportunities for expanding partnerships and promoting long-term organizational success.

• Champions transparency and inclusivity by actively seeking, listening to, and incorporating diverse perspectives.

Problem Solving:

• Leads specialized, advanced problem-solving efforts, serving as an escalation point for complex issues.

• Guides others to leverage innovative data-driven techniques to address ambiguous or novel issues, identify root causes, and drives the implementation of solutions that prevent future issues.

Continuous Learning:

• Leverages deep industry knowledge and expertise to serve as a thought leader within the organization.

• Contributes to the advancement of the field or industry through thought leadership (e.g., conference presentations, white papers, research contributions).

• Maintains and evolves expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends, technologies, and industry standards, ensuring the organization remains current with best practices.

• Champions continuous learning and knowledge sharing, promoting professional development across teams. Applies new knowledge to drive advancement and mentors others to do the same.

Continuous Improvement:

• Develops innovative solutions and drives the implementation of ideas that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, protocols, and workflows across the organization.

• Evaluates effectiveness of updated approaches and methods for continued improvement to enhance efficiencies and ensure changes align with organizational goals.

• Designs and develops metrics to measure success of improvement initiatives.

Performance and Development:

• Serves as a subject matter expert regarding talent needs and organizational talent strategy.

• Imparts leadership and expert knowledge throughout the talent development pipeline including candidate interviews, candidate assessment, and hiring decisions, ensuring alignment with organizational talent strategy.