Principal Software Engineer – Production Engineering & Reliability

About the Role

Newline™ by Fifth Third is an enterprise-grade embedded finance platform enabling organizations to build, launch, and scale compliant banking, payments, and lending solutions.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join our Production Engineering team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on operating, debugging, and improving highly distributed, mission-critical payment systems. The ideal candidate thrives in complex production environments and enjoys solving deep technical challenges across applications, infrastructure, and data systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead production triage and incident response across APIs, payment systems, distributed services, infrastructure, and databases.
• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues spanning code, infrastructure, data, and third-party dependencies.
• Partner with engineering teams to implement permanent fixes and improve platform reliability.
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting, automation, and operational tooling.
• Improve system observability, resiliency, and debuggability.
• Work across a mixed technology stack including Ruby on Rails, Java, AWS, APIs, and SQL databases.
• Develop runbooks and diagnostic workflows for operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers and influence best practices across engineering and SRE teams.
• Participate in architectural discussions to build highly reliable and scalable systems.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Production Engineering, SRE, or Distributed Systems.
• Strong experience debugging production issues end-to-end (application, infrastructure, data, and dependencies).

Hands-on experience with:

• AWS and cloud-native environments
• Ruby on Rails and/or Java
• APIs, Microservices, and Distributed Systems
• SQL and database troubleshooting
• Observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, etc.

Deep understanding of:

• System behavior in production
• Fault isolation and troubleshooting
• Performance optimization and resiliency patterns

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to work effectively during incidents and high-pressure situations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Payments, FinTech, Banking, or other regulated environments.
• Experience building and operating large-scale, high-availability platforms.
• Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Why Join Newline?

• Work on a modern embedded finance platform backed by a leading U.S. bank.
• Solve complex technical challenges in real-time payments and distributed systems.
• Influence the reliability and scalability of enterprise-grade financial platforms.
• Be part of a culture focused on ownership, automation, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.

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