Lead Specialty Software Engineer - Capital Markets Reference Data

About this role:
Wells Fargo is seeking a Lead Specialty Software Engineer to join our Corporate and Investment Banking Technology team. This strategic role centers on modernizing and expanding our Reference Data Platform, a critical application supporting Capital Markets business & trading. You will lead the architecture, design, and development of high-performance systems for ingesting, mastering, and distributing financial instruments reference data - requiring deep hands-on expertise in scalable data processing and distributed systems. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in distributed systems development, accelerated delivery leveraging agentic AI tools, and a proven ability to lead initiatives while ensuring operational excellence, risk management, and regulatory compliance.
In this role, you will:

• Lead complex initiatives on selected domains, delivering scalable and resilient solutions.
• Accelerate development velocity by leveraging agentic AI tools across the team's engineering workflows.
• Champion data quality and governance practices including golden-source determination, cross-vendor reconciliation, and data lineage tracking across the reference data platform.
• Ensure systems are monitored to increase operational efficiency and managed to mitigate risk.
• Define opportunities to maximize resource utilization and improve processes while reducing cost.
• Lead, design, develop, test and implement applications and system components, tools and utilities, models, simulation, and analytics to manage complex business functions using sophisticated technologies.
• Resolve coding, testing and escalated platform issues of a technically challenging nature.
• Lead team to ensure compliance and risk management requirements for supported area are met and work with other stakeholders to implement key risk initiatives.
• Mentor less experienced software engineers.
• Collaborate and influence all levels of professionals including managers.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of Specialty Software Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
• 5+ years designing and implementing distributed systems using Java with expertise in memory management, concurrency, JMS, and native I/O
• 3+ years of Java 17+, including modern features like Streams API, records, and enhanced concurrency
• 3+ years of implementing microservices, preferably using Spring ecosystem (Boot, Batch and/or Data)
• 3+ years of SQL experience including complex query optimization
• 2+ years of experience building event-driven architectures using Kafka, Solace, etc.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience building cloud-ready solutions with Azure, GCP or OpenShift.
• Experience developing data APIs exposed via API gateways
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Harness, GitHub Actions, or similar) and automated testing frameworks (JUnit, Mockito)
• Demonstrated knowledge of LLMs, prompt engineering techniques, context engineering, and spec-driven development
• Domain expertise in Financial Instrument Reference Data including integration with market data vendors
• Proven track record in developing low-latency, high-reliability applications for financial services or trading platforms
• Experience using distributed caching technologies (Apache Ignite, Redis, Coherence)
• Experience with Python (pandas, PySpark, or similar) for data transformation, enrichment, and data mastering workflows
• Experience implementing rule-based data mastering systems
• Front-end development experience with React
• Well versed in Agile development strategies and ceremonies, Test Driven Development & DevOps practices
• Strong foundation in object-oriented analysis and design, algorithms, and data structures
• Excellent analytical and communication skills
• Lead team to achieve objectives
• Partner with production support and platform engineering teams

Job Expectations:

• Develop and deliver software for Reference Data platform components as a hands-on individual contributor
• Collaborate with Product Owners and business users to translate requirements into functional and technical specifications
• Analyze and refactor legacy systems to align with a scalable microservice architecture
• Design and document current-state and target-state architectures for platform modernization initiatives
• Write high-quality, performant Java code applying object-oriented principles and proven design patterns
• Conduct thorough unit and functional testing; document all development activities per team standards
• Ensure quality, maintainability, and extensibility of supported systems and risk applications
• Build resilient applications requiring near zero production support
• Ramp quickly on new business domains within Capital Markets technology
• Leverage agentic AI tools to accelerate delivery and maintain high code quality
• Identify opportunities to improve engineering processes and propose solutions using AI technologies

Posting Location:

• 300 S Brevard St., Charlotte, NC 28202

Posting End Date:
30 Jun 2026
*Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.
We Value Equal Opportunity
Wells Fargo is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristic.
Employees support our focus on building strong customer relationships balanced with a strong risk mitigating and compliance-driven culture which firmly establishes those disciplines as critical to the success of our customers and company. They are accountable for execution of all applicable risk programs (Credit, Market, Financial Crimes, Operational, Regulatory Compliance), which includes effectively following and adhering to applicable Wells Fargo policies and procedures, appropriately fulfilling risk and compliance obligations, timely and effective escalation and remediation of issues, and making sound risk decisions. There is emphasis on proactive monitoring, governance, risk identification and escalation, as well as making sound risk decisions commensurate with the business unit's risk appetite and all risk and compliance program requirements.
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