AI Forward Principal Engineer I at Western Alliance Bank in Phoenix, AZ

Job description

Job Title: AI Forward Principal Engineer I Location: Block 23 What you'll do: As a Principal Engineer I, you'll provide SME expertise in your respective domain as well as adjacent domains to ensure solutions are safe, secure, compliant and reliable. You'll identify development and support needs as well as take on large and complex design responsibilities supporting project tasks. You'll also engage with project and business sponsors refining requirements and objectives of targeted solutions. As a Principal Engineer I, you also facilitate dialogue and activities, and work to ensure team collaboration, including teams outside of your domain. You'll develop effective presentations and narratives for IT audiences. In this role, you'll also develop the technical skills of one more junior engineer. In this role, you will partner closely with architecture, product, and business stakeholders to define solution strategies that support Lending/Omni Service Fabric (LSF/OSF) platform objectives. You will champion AI forward engineering practices, guide teams through complex technical decisions, and establish patterns that accelerate delivery while maintaining WAB engineering standards. You will also develop clear technical narratives and presentations for both executive and Build the solution design of efforts that can be handed off to lower-level engineers for execution assuring reuse of platforms where possible. Review technical plans developed by lower-level engineers and analysts to assure quality designs prevail which can support the volumetrics of our business partners objectives. Build comprehensive measurement dashboards that give performance insight into key applications of the bank which can feed operational results of our business partners. Work independently or sometimes with architecture team counterparts to lay out the final documentation required for proper ongoing reference of the given solution, including physical and logical layouts with cross reference to use case models while enforcing standards, as well as assisting in the modification or buildout of procedures that support areas of operations across IT. Provide senior‑level technical leadership for Lending and Loan Operations initiatives, contributing to solution architecture and engineering decisions aligned to business and regulatory requirements. Design, build, and maintain enterprise APIs using Azure API Management (APIM), ensuring consistent security, versioning, throttling, observability, and lifecycle management. Own assigned portions of end‑to‑end technical solution design, producing clear and executable designs that can be delivered by engineering teams while adhering to WAB architecture standards and reuse of enterprise capabilities. Review technical designs, code, and delivery plans developed by engineers to ensure solutions meet performance, resilience, and compliance expectations. Partner with business, architecture, security, and risk teams to translate Lending and Loan Ops requirements into compliant technical solutions, communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Mentor engineers and promote adoption of AI forward, cloud first, and platform driven engineering practices within the Lending and Loan Operations technology teams. Lead Platform Ops team to support Lending and Loan Ops incidents, change requests, business-as-usual activities, BCDR and compliances What you'll need: 8+ years of related experience in software engineering, IT support or IT development, with demonstrated experience supporting Lending, Loans, Credit Admin, or Financial Services platforms. Hands on experience designing and developing cloud native applications on the Azure platform, including APIs, data integrations, and full stack solutions. Strong experience with .NET, Python, modern JavaScript frameworks (React preferred), SQL, and ETL technologies. Bachelor's degree in related field required; Masters or MBA in related field preferred. Previous t