Lead Specialty Software Engineer - Capital Markets Reference Data

About this role:

Wells Fargo is seeking a Lead Specialty Software Engineer to join our Corporate and Investment Banking Technology team. This strategic role centers on modernizing and expanding our Reference Data Platform, a critical application supporting Capital Markets business & trading. You will lead the architecture, design, and development of high-performance systems for ingesting, mastering, and distributing financial instruments reference data - requiring deep hands-on expertise in scalable data processing and distributed systems. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in distributed systems development, accelerated delivery leveraging agentic AI tools, and a proven ability to lead initiatives while ensuring operational excellence, risk management, and regulatory compliance.

In this role, you will:

• Lead complex initiatives on selected domains, delivering scalable and resilient solutions.

• Accelerate development velocity by leveraging agentic AI tools across the team's engineering workflows.

• Champion data quality and governance practices including golden-source determination, cross-vendor reconciliation, and data lineage tracking across the reference data platform.

• Ensure systems are monitored to increase operational efficiency and managed to mitigate risk.

• Define opportunities to maximize resource utilization and improve processes while reducing cost.

• Lead, design, develop, test and implement applications and system components, tools and utilities, models, simulation, and analytics to manage complex business functions using sophisticated technologies.

• Resolve coding, testing and escalated platform issues of a technically challenging nature.

• Lead team to ensure compliance and risk management requirements for supported area are met and work with other stakeholders to implement key risk initiatives.

• Mentor less experienced software engineers.

• Collaborate and influence all levels of professionals including managers.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of Specialty Software Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education

• 5+ years designing and implementing distributed systems using Java with expertise in memory management, concurrency, JMS, and native I/O

• 3+ years of Java 17+, including modern features like Streams API, records, and enhanced concurrency

• 3+ years of implementing microservices, preferably using Spring ecosystem (Boot, Batch and/or Data)

• 3+ years of SQL experience including complex query optimization

• 2+ years of experience building event-driven architectures using Kafka, Solace, etc.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience building cloud-ready solutions with Azure, GCP or OpenShift.

• Experience developing data APIs exposed via API gateways

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Harness, GitHub Actions, or similar) and automated testing frameworks (JUnit, Mockito)

• Demonstrated knowledge of LLMs, prompt engineering techniques, context engineering, and spec-driven development

• Domain expertise in Financial Instrument Reference Data including integration with market data vendors

• Proven track record in developing low-latency, high-reliability applications for financial services or trading platforms

• Experience using distributed caching technologies (Apache Ignite, Redis, Coherence)

• Experience with Python (pandas, PySpark, or similar) for data transformation, enrichment, and data mastering workflows

• Experience implementing rule-based data mastering systems

• Front-end development experience with React

• Well versed in Agile development strategies and ceremonies, Test Driven Development & DevOps practices

• Strong foundation in object-oriented analysis and design, algorithms, and data structures

• Excellent analytical and communication skills

• Lead team to achieve objectives

• Partner with production support and platform engineering teams

Job Expectations:

• Develop and deliver software for Reference Data platform components as a hands-on individual contributor

• Collaborate with Product Owners and business users to translate requirements into functional and technical specifications

• Analyze and refactor legacy systems to align with a scalable microservice architecture

• Design and document current-state and target-state architectures for platform modernizatio