Principal Engineer/Tech Lead

We’re building the next generation of financial planning & analysis software for banks and credit unions — integrated Profitability, Budgeting & Planning, and CECL solutions that give finance and treasury teams a single, reliable platform for performance management and regulatory compliance.

Our Cork engineering team of 45+ engineers owns the FP&A product suite end-to-end, and we’re in the middle of a meaningful technology transformation: modernizing our stack, adopting AI-first development practices, and building agentic capabilities that change how financial institutions operate.

As Principal Engineer / Tech Lead for FP&A, you’ll be the senior technical leader driving the modernization of Empyrean’s financial planning & analysis products. This is a hands‑on role — you’ll spend the majority of your time writing code, leading by example, and raising the technical bar across the Cork engineering team. You’ll take ownership of the hardest modernization problems: decomposing legacy systems, building modern replacements, and ensuring the transition happens incrementally without breaking what works.

You’ll report to the Director of Engineering (FP&A) and work closely with the EA team and Platform Engineering. Your direct impact will be felt in the codebase daily — through the code you write, the PRs you review, the patterns you establish, and the engineers you level up.

This role is Cork‑based (Ireland required) and requires three days in the office per week.

• 60%+ Hands‑On Engineering— Writing production code, leading complex implementations, reviewing PRs, debugging hard problems, pair programming with engineers. You’re the person the team looks to when something is technically difficult.

• 20% Technical Leadership & Mentorship— Setting coding standards, leading design reviews, mentoring senior and intermediate engineers, driving technical quality across the team. If direct reports are added, leading a squad of 3-8 engineers.

• 15% Modernization Strategy — Defining the incremental migration path from legacy to modern patterns. Identifying what to modernize first, what to leave, and how to sequence work so the team delivers value continuously.

• 5% Innovation & Experimentation— Exploring how AI/agentic capabilities can accelerate modernization and improve the product. Building prototypes that demonstrate what’s possible.

Lead the Modernization: Own the technical execution of modernizing Empyrean’s FP&A stack. Decompose legacy monolithic patterns into clean, testable, maintainable services. Define the migration strategy and lead from the front — writing the hardest code, solving the gnarliest problems.

Write Code Every Day: This isn’t a role that drifts into full‑time meetings. You write production code. You review PRs with rigor and care. You pair with engineers on complex problems. Your GitHub activity tells the story of your impact.

Raise the Technical Bar: Establish coding standards, testing practices, and engineering patterns that make the whole team better. Lead design reviews that teach, not just approve. Build reference implementations that show engineers what “great” looks like in this codebase.

Ship Incrementally: Modernize without big‑bang rewrites. You know how to strangle legacy patterns, introduce new boundaries, and deliver value in every sprint — not just “we’ll see the benefits in 6 months.” Every modernization step improves something measurable: performance, testability, developer experience, or customer capability.

Bridge Legacy and Modern: Navigate the reality of a production system serving financial institutions while simultaneously transforming it. You understand that “stop the world and rewrite” is a fantasy — real modernization means coexistence, migration paths, and backward compatibility.

Leverage AI to Accelerate: Use AI development tools extensively in your own work and teach the team to do the same. Identify opportunities where agentic capabilities could accelerate the modernization effort or unlock new product capabilities. You could drive a new product initiative from insights gained during modernization.

Mentor and Grow Engineers: Level up senior and intermediate engineers through code review, pairing, design discussions, and setting clear technical expectations. Build a culture where engineers are proud of the code they create.

• 10+ years in software engineering with consistent, demonstrable hands‑on coding throughout

• Critical: Led significant modernization efforts — migrating legacy systems to modern architecture in production, at scale, without customer disruption

• Track record of being the strongest technical contributor on teams of 15+ engineers

• Experience mentoring and leveling up engineers across skill levels

• Financial services, banking, or regulated industry experience a strong plus

• Expert‑level .NET/C#: Deep knowledge of the framework, performance characteristics, modern patterns (async/await, dependency injection, clean architecture, domain modeling). You don’t just use .NET — you understand it.

• Strong TypeScript/Angular: Full‑stack capability, not just backend. You can own a feature end‑to‑end. xcfaprz Cloud‑native development on Azure (AWS/GCP transferable)

• Database performance: query optimization, schema design, migration strategies for systems processing millions of records

• Testing strategy: unit, integration, contract, and end‑to‑end testing at appropriate levels. You know which tests to write and which not to.

• CI/CD and deployment automation: GitHub Actions, infrastructure‑as‑code, deployment pipelines

• API design: RESTful services, versioning, backward compatibility, contract testing

• Refactoring at scale: strangler fig patterns, feature flags, incremental decomposition

• Migrated monolithic applications to service‑oriented or microservice architectures

• Improved system performance by 5‑10x through profiling, optimization, and architectural changes

• Introduced modern testing, CI/CD, and deployment practices to teams that didn’t have them

• Maintained production stability during significant architectural transitions

• Specific, concrete examples of before/after — not theoretical frameworks

• Active daily user of AI development tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code) — these are how you work, not tools you’ve tried once

• Demonstrated productivity gains from AI‑assisted development

• Interest in agentic capabilities and how they apply to product development

• Understanding of how AI changes the economics of modernization (what’s now feasible that wasn’t before)

• Engineers who stopped coding when they got “senior” in their title

• Modernization theorists who talk about patterns but haven’t executed migrations in production

• Anyone who proposes “6‑month rewrite” plans instead of incremental delivery

• Tech leads whose primary tool is Jira, not their IDE

• Engineers without specific, measurable modernization outcomes they can articulate

• “AI is on my radar” without demonstrated daily usage and productivity impact