Principal Engineer Innovation & AI

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

We are looking for a highly capable, collaborative and experienced Principal Engineer specifically in emerging technologies, AI and Machine Learning. This technical leader will be an expert on the technical aspects of designing, implementing, testing of various initiatives in the Empower Technology Innovation Lab. This instrumental role will work both independently and collaboratively across multiple teams and will inform engineering decisions within the Innovation Lab technology team. They will also be a thought leader and internal consultant on emerging technologies and AI/ML.

What you will do:

• Lead engineering decisions within the technology Innovation Lab team.
• Experiment with emerging technologies with a rigorous focus on business value.
• Research latest technological patterns, technologies and products to inform strategic experimentation roadmap.
• Develop solutions that demonstrate real business value in a lab environment.
• Lead improvements within our development process, culture and tools.
• Design and develop CI/CD automated code delivery pipelines.
• Respond to evolving and changing security conditions. Implement and contribute to security guidelines.
• Understand and apply Empower's security controls in your design and code implementation.
• Assess a variety of third-party and open source technologies.
• Develop technical perspectives, standards, solutions and strategies that add value to the firm.
• Generate innovative ideas and develop prototypes and proof of concepts.
• Design effective solutions with well understood tradeoffs that meet the business requirements.
• Propose new and innovative solutions to meet the fast-changing business environment.
• Adapt to emerging and changing priorities.
• Execute work in an iterative and transparent fashion, regularly demonstrating progress, learnings and value.
• Partner with architecture to inform the design and implementation of the Innovation Lab cloud architecture.
• Consult with production teams who are delivering technological solutions that were incubated in the lab.
• Be an emerging technology thought leader across Empower.
• Deliver value through a strong collaborative approach spanning multiple geographically dispersed teams.
• Mentor and develop engineers at all levels through sharing and learning.
• Be a role model for open, honest and collaborative approach to problem solving.
• Adopt and contribute to best practices, standards & guidance, then subsequently provide coaching of technology team members.

What you will bring:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related field of study. (or equivalent experience)
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including AI and machine learning.
• Deep experience with cloud technologies and native cloud capabilities within platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• Direct and proven experience designing, building and delivering emerging technologies like AI/ML.
• Expert experience with serverless applications through integrating Lambda functions and event sources, and Microservices.
• Expert experience with object-oriented programming and experience with at least one object-oriented programming language (Java, C#, Ruby, Python).
• Expert experience with at least one high-level programming language and web framework (NodeJS, Express, Hapi, etc.).
• Experience with cloud architecture patterns and frameworks, such as AWS Well Architected Framework.
• Solid understanding of web technologies, such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML5, XML, JSON.
• Solid understanding of AWS database technologies such as RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and database schema design.
• Experience in automated testing including unit and functional testing using Java, JUnit, JSUnit, Selenium, JMeter, LoadRunner.
• Knowledgeable in modern integration methods (API Gateway/Web Services,