Principal Engineer - Assisted Banking Platform
First seen by Alion on Aug 19, 2026.
Candescent :
Candescent is a forward-thinking technology company transforming how financial institutions deliver Intelligent Banking experiences. We unite digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions that power and connect digital banking, account opening, and branch solutionscreating seamless engagement across digital, remote, and in-person channels.
Our Experience-Led, Intelligence-Driven approach combines human-centered design with data, automation, and cloud-based innovation. Built on an API-first architecture, our extensible ecosystem enables institutions to adapt quickly, integrate easily, and unlock new opportunities for growthturning every customer interaction into a moment of clarity, confidence, and connection.
Principal Engineer :
Position Summary :
We are seeking talented Principal Engineers to lead the architectural vision and evolution of our SaaS platform into a modern, resilient, and AI-powered ecosystem. This role plays a critical part in shaping our long-term technology strategy, providing cross-team technical leadership, and ensuring our platform is secure, scalable, performant, and data driven. Principal Engineers work across product domains to design efficient, future-proof solutions that align with strategic objectives, proactively reducing technical roadblocks and coordinating dependencies across teams.
A primary focus of this role is driving the technology roadmap for multiple banking products performing assisted banking related services ensuring that they continue to evolve as a single unified, extensible platform of services with a shared architecture serving the needs of our customers who leverage our SaaS or Single Tenant Hosted offerings or choose to deploy in their own managed environments.
We expect you will promote consistency, operational efficiency and accelerated innovation working with the multiple teams building this overall product platform and its multiple offerings. You will work closely as well with Product Management and Engineering leadership along with Enterprise Architecture to deliver the assisted banking platform and to evolve it alongside other platforms and offerings within Candescent overall. Your involvement will extend into all areas of functional and non-functional requirements inclusive of DevOps and how we successfully operate our SaaS and Single Tenant Hosted offerings.
You will apply your knowledge of financial self-service ATMs and Kiosks and branch banking devices and standards and their demands on solution architectures ensuring Candescents assisted banking platform delivers the best possible service levels with exceptional cost optimization. This is a highly collaborative and strategic role for a forward-thinking engineer who is passionate about building and sustaining platforms for scale and delivering long-term impact. This title may also be called Architect.
Key Areas of Responsibility :
- Define and drive platform architecture strategy focused on scalability, modularity, security, and resilience
- Lead assisted banking platform evolution to a more feature rich, diversely integrated and richly device connected set of capabilities that allow financial institutions to better serve and assist their customers thru remote and in-person channels
- Champion architecture best practices including domain-driven and event-driven design, and cloud-native principles; apply and govern thru Architecture Review Board (ARB) engagement with other Principal Engineers, Enterprise Architects and Staff Engineers/Leads
- Define architecture and set technical requirements for third party components / services and branch device (e.g. ATM, TCR, printers, scanners, pinpads) inclusion or integrations. Identify and coordinate platform services use from other Candescent product teams.
- Parter with Product Management and Professional Services to Define configurations, environments for test and integration, documentation and overall customer onboarding flows
- Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Data teams to embed AI/ML, analytics, and personalization into platform capabilities
- Define and enforce standards for API governance, system design, observability, and security
- Evaluate emerging technologies for future adoption
- Collaborate with InfoSec, SRE, and DevOps to ensure reliability, compliance, and operational health
Product Design and Development :
- Create and maintain architectural artifacts including solution blueprints, dependency maps, and design specifications
- Collaborate with Portfolio and Product leadership to align technology solutions with strategic business goals
- Establish and enforce technical standards, policies, and guidelines for product teams, leveraging ARBs along with direct engagement
- Work with product teams to ensure architectural alignment with product backlogs and technical direction
- Provide technical leadership through mentoring, code reviews, proof of concept development, critical component (version 1.0) co-development with engineering teams and guidance on architecture principles and design patterns
- Manage architectural risks and dependencies across teams and systems
Product Strategy, Vision, and Planning :
- Manage and communicate across functions a clear technology roadmap, working closely with Product Management to ensure the assisted banking platform continues to adopt relevant newer cloud-native technologies while maintaining a secure and supported underlying software stack
- Advise Product Management on adoption of new third party technologies thru technical and architectural assessments, proofs of concept and vendor evaluations
- Identify and propose opportunities to innovate inclusive of AI enabled functionality, operational efficiencies, reliability enhancements, and end user experience improvements
Qualifications :
- 14+ years of experience in software engineering and enterprise architecture
- Familiarity with edge device integration for data and image acquisition along with suitable network architecture topologies for connectivity to public cloud services or customer data centers
- Desirable to have experience with device integrations in branch environments
- Experience with Unified Communications (UC) services available in the market to integrate for video conferencing, instant messaging, MMS/SMS, etc.
- Experience with contact center technology platforms and service offerings available in the market
- Experience with fintech and banking standards including ISO 20022, Open Banking, FDX, ANSI X9.100-187-2021, CPA Standard 015
- Strong understanding of cloud-native technologies such as GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, containers, and service mesh
- Proficient in distributed systems, multi-tenancy, and event-driven architecture performing real-time transaction processing from UI or API acquisition / initiation thru posting
- Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML into product and platform architecture
- Strong grasp of financial regulatory, security, and data compliance requirements
- Proven leadership in guiding high-performing engineering teams
- Expertise in SRE and DevOps practices including CI/CD tools like GitHub, Jenkins, and Google Cloud Build
- Strong collaboration and communication skills to lead cross-functional initiatives and articulate complex concepts
- Automation-first mindset with a drive to optimize delivery pipelines and eliminate manual processes
Statement to Third Party Agencies :
To ALL recruitment agencies : Candescent only accepts resumes from agencies on the preferred supplier list. Please do not forward resumes to our applicant tracking system, Candescent employees, or any Candescent facility. Candescent is not responsible for any fees or charges associated with unsolicited resumes.
Skills
System Architecture, Distributed Systems, Microservices Architecture, Cloud Computing, Product Design, Product Strategy, Unified Communications