Principal Application Engineer - Day Shift

The Principal Application Engineer is responsible for designing, modernising and governing enterprise applications. Operating as a principal-level engineering leader, the role guides application solution delivery, shapes technical implementation decisions, and ensures solutions are secure, reliable, scalable, maintainable and aligned to business outcomes. It partners across enterprise architecture, business, product engineering, infrastructure, information security, networking, cloud operations, DevOps, platform engineering and vendor teams to deliver application solutions that meet enterprise standards and operational readiness expectations. This role exists to improve application quality, accelerate delivery, reduce technology risk and support the Institute's modernisation and cost-optimisation goals.

·       Application engineering and design: Deep expertise across enterprise applications, SaaS platforms, cloud-native services, integration patterns, APIs, edge services, identity, observability and secure software delivery.

·       Decision quality and problem solving: Evaluates implementation options against risk, cost, delivery readiness and long-term supportability, and makes a clear recommendation rather than presenting an undifferentiated list.

·       Strategic and systems thinking: Sees the whole application estate rather than the individual solution in front of them, and identifies duplication, lifecycle risk and rationalisation opportunity across it.

·       Technology risk management: Identifies security, compliance, reliability and operational risk early, and proposes proportionate mitigation rather than blocking delivery.

·       Cross-functional influence: Secures alignment across engineering, security, infrastructure, product and vendor teams without direct reporting authority.

·       Executive communication: Translates technical risk and engineering trade-offs into business impact, options and recommendations that a non-technical executive audience can act upon.

·       Governance and standards: Defines practical engineering standards and guardrails that teams adopt because they reduce friction, not because they are mandated.

·       Mentoring and coaching: Raises the quality of technical decision-making across teams through design review, pattern definition and hands-on support for complex problems.

·       Collaboration: Works effectively with business stakeholders, technology teams and vendors, and improves their experience of engineering and readiness governance.

·       Independence and autonomy: Operates at principal level with minimal direction, setting the agenda for own work and for the technical forums they lead.

·       Accountability: Owns the engineering decisions made in review, including their consequences in production.

Complexity: Holds multiple interdependent systems, standards and constraints in view simultaneously and reasons about their interactions.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

·       Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience. (Required)

·       12+ years of experience across software engineering, application engineering, solution delivery, cloud engineering or related technical disciplines. (Required)

·       Significant hands-on experience in software development, application engineering, API design, cloud services, distributed systems, troubleshooting and production support. (Required)

·       Strong knowledge of REST APIs, GraphQL, HTTP, API gateways, event-driven messaging and enterprise integration patterns; experience with the AWS platform and cloud-native services, including scalable, secure, resilient and cost-aware application delivery patterns. (Required)

·       Strong knowledge of engineering governance, application portfolio management, operational readiness practices and technology risk management. (Required)

·       Familiarity with OWASP application and API security guidance and secure software engineering principles; strong knowledge of security and compliance frameworks such as NIST CSF, ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA and CPRA. (Required)

·       Experience with CDN, WAF, DNS, SSL/TLS, traffic management and edge platforms such as Akamai; understanding of containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, DevOps practices, platform engineering concepts, observability and modern deployment patterns. (Required)

Experience leading engineering review forums, technical standards, design reviews, operational readiness reviews or enterprise delivery guardrails; experience supporting AI-enabled application initiatives, responsible AI reviews or vendor evaluations for AI platforms. (Preferred)

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

·       Role is primarily office-based, with participation in Agile and governance ceremonies.

·       Candidates must have flexibility to overlap with US Pacific Time (PT) business hours, including availability for late-day meetings and occasional extended hours to support cross-regional collaboration and governance forums.

Willingness and ability to travel domestically and/or internationally, if needed.

Disclaimer: This job description indicates in general terms, the type and level of work performed as well as the typical responsibilities of employees in this classification and it may be changed by management at any time. Other duties may also apply. Nothing in this job description changes the at-will employment relationship existing between the Company and its employees.