Dir Software Engineering

Grow your career with a growing organization

Whether they’re helping people reach their long-term financial goals or providing personal wealth management strategies, every associate contributes to changing the lives of those we serve for the better. When it comes to job satisfaction, that’s hard to beat. And from a personal satisfaction perspective, you’ll enjoy the freedom to support causes that matter to you and experience a truly inclusive work environment. Your future starts now.

About Us: 

        Empower Personal Wealth (EPW) is a remote-delivery, industry-leading digital wealth management company that helps people transform their financial lives through technology and advisory services. EPW today handles 18+ million plan participants (e.g. 401K, HSA) and our state-of-the-art tools and technology provide investors with a complete financial picture. Our registered investment advisors offer expert guidance and customized strategies based on a personal understanding of an investor’s financial picture and goals. Newly formed Empower Personal Wealth, launched in the first quarter of 2023, continued its strong growth with $18 billion total sales in 2023 (up 13% YoY), and ended Q4 2023 with an AUA of $72 billion, up 31% from Q4 2022., virtually delivered from offices across the U.S. Empower’ s U.S. defined contribution retirement services business continues to grow faster than its peers and has now reached US$1.5 trillion in AUA (up 17% YoY). Net inflows in 2023 were US$11 billion. This shows how the company is well positioned for growth overall.

The Opportunity: 

           You will work on data that will amaze you, work with a team that will inspire you, and help create products that truly add value to our users.  EPW’s server team is extremely agile and builds the backbone of our award-winning application with cloud native and shift left development philosophy. Our data is rich and large, and this is your chance to be an influential member of this team, not just on EPW but also on the financial lives of our users. We keep our feet on the ground and heads in the cloud.

The Candidate: We are looking for a passionate Director of Software Engineering to lead the team’s full-cycle development efforts. This role is supervising a team of passionate engineers and works closely with the Product and Design organization across geography. You need to be a thinker and a doer. You need to be smart and build smart products. You need to be ambitious. You have a passion for, and experience in solving large-scale distributed systems challenges. You have demonstrated prior success as an engineer/architect of complex distributed systems.  You are equally passionate about working with engineering and non-engineering stakeholders. A strong partner, who can collaborate effectively and selflessly. This is not an easy job: you will need to wear multiple hats, work with many unknowns, travel many unpaved roads to tackle large-scale problems. But it will be your finest work and creation, and an amazing engineering team is there to collaborate with you and support you.

The Work:

              As a Director of Software Engineering, you will work on many initiatives, integrations, innovations, while always trying to scale it more, improve performance and keep the system secure.

• Direct daily operations of your team and actively work with other technology leaders, managers, supervisors, Develops, partners, security team and others, to solicit cooperation and resolve problems.
• Manage the offshore team for all functional roles and scale it to support our growth
• Assign and review the work of systems analysts, programmers, and other computer-related workers by establishing priorities, developing standards, and setting deadlines. Mentor and guide engineers to plan and execute their career paths.
• Design, implement(development), deploy, and support new web-based applications and container-based microservices using server technologies stacks that include Java, MySQL, Apache/Tomcat, and open-source packages such as Spring, Hibernate, etc. Be a champion to design and implementation of container-based infrastructure and microservices with technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, EKS and Helm.
• Initial few months would involve hands-on coding to understand the ecosystem so that you are in a commanding position to lead this team.
• Reviewing code on Gitlab, participating on joint testing sessions is normal in day-to-day tasks.
• End to end accountability and ownership of the initiatives. The role would also involve growing a autonomous team in India.
• Strong SQL/NOSQL fundamentals and experience at least in one of them is a must.
• Define and implement REST based web services exposing personal financial services for managing financial accounts, payments, investment portfolios, credit, and bank products. Knowledge of gRPC would be a plus.
• Execute end-to-end software development in an agile development methodology including  requirements analysis, architecture, design, coding, testing, deployment and support using scientific analysis and mathematical models to predict and measure outcome and consequences of design.
• Communication is key to this role, clear written, spoken and listening ability in English language is a must. Creating design documents, building knowledge base for overall EPW organization is a must.
• Participate in hiring and onboarding, setting, and evaluating performance goals to identify, attract, and retain top talent.

Skills and Experience:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Mandatory experience of hiring and people management for 10+ people.
• Strong technical skills and ability to guide the technical direction of the team.
• Experience of collaborating with the product and design organizations
• Experience working on opensource technologies like Docker or ContainerD, Kubernetes, SAML2.0 or OIDC
• Experience with AWS Cloud Computing infrastructure like EKS, IAM, EC2, S3, and APIs
• Expertise with standard server-side software technologies, including  Java, MySQL, Spring, JPA, etc.
• Experience with REST or gRPC design.
• Experience with ORM, ORM tools with relational databases (MySQL | Oracle | Postgres | SQL Server).
• Experience with NOSQL technologies (e.g. DynamoDB, Kafka, Cassandra) is a plus.
• Solid practitioner’s understanding of secure application development best practices, such as OWASP
• Deployment of scalable web systems with architectural requirements for high availability, high throughput, low response time, etc.
• Experience in Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA/OOD) with appropriate use of design patterns.
• Desire to grow professionally with a small, focused, development team in a fast-paced team.
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.
• Bachelor's degree or higher, in Computer Science or related field.
• Strong strategic planning and project management skills.
• Should focus on honing their strategic thinking, influencing company-wide technology strategies.
• Demonstrate the ability to drive transformative changes.

This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications of the job.  The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time.   You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description.   You may be required perform other duties that are not included on this job description. The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason, as per terms and conditions of your employment contract.

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity.  All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.