Sr. Software Development Engineer

As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the team, you will design and build distributed, microservices-based applications that power Clearwater's platform [and core investment records]. You will provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and drive complex systems from design through production. Success in this role requires strong problem-solving, clear communication, excellent coding ability, and a collaborative approach.

About the Team
Our team builds and operates scalable, resilient microservices and distributed applications that serve Clearwater clients. We work in a cloud-native environment and partner closely with product and client-facing teams.

Responsibilities

- Provide technical leadership and strategic direction for the team.

- Lead the design, implementation, documentation, deployment, and adoption of scalable, resilient distributed systems and microservices.

- Design well-factored APIs and event-driven integrations between services, with attention to performance, fault tolerance, and backward compatibility.

- Ensure data integrity, security, and observability across services, and secure handling of sensitive financial data.

- Break down quarterly deliverables into well-organized stories, weaving in reliability, scalability, security, and performance.

- Mentor less-experienced engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and guidance.

- Work with product and clients to uncover internal and external user needs.

- Track and communicate team metrics (delivery, quality, operational health).

- Get proactively involved in urgent issues and propose effective solutions; own on-call and operational excellence.

- Take on unowned work that improves team velocity and quality.

- Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies, and evaluate their fit.

- Perform other reasonable duties as required by management.

Required Qualifications

- Bachelor's or master's degree in engineering, computer science, or a related field.

- 7+ years of enterprise software development in Java or another backend language (e.g., Python, Go).

- Experience designing and implementing distributed systems using microservices and event-driven architectures.

- Professional experience running production systems on a public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including containers, CI/CD, and observability.

- Strong data modeling skills and experience with relational and NoSQL data stores.

- Experience with APIs (REST/gRPC), messaging/streaming (Kafka, SQS, etc.), and designing for scalability and resilience.

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with excellent attention to detail.

- Excellent written and verbal communication, and strong documentation habits.

- Commitment to continuous learning, client satisfaction, and teamwork in a SaaS environment.

Preferred Qualifications

- Exposure to AI/ML or LLM-based features (RAG, embeddings, prompt engineering) or interest in applying AI to engineering workflows.

- Familiarity with financial services, investment accounting, or fixed-income data.

- Experience with data governance, privacy, and regulatory/compliance requirements.

- Infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and Kubernetes experience.

- Track record of technical mentorship and leading cross-team initiatives.