Principal Engineer in London

About this role: Wells Fargo is seeking a Principal Engineer in technology as part of Commercial and Corporate & Investment Banking Technology (CCIBT). Wells Fargo Securities (WFS) is the Capital Markets and Investment Banking division of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. Within Institutional Investor Services, Electronic Trading Technology delivers scalable, resilient, and low‑latency platforms supporting cross‑asset trading strategies.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to join the Electronic Trading organization, focused on Rates and cross‑asset electronic trading platforms. This role is a hands‑on individual contributor and technical authority, responsible for the design, evolution, and modernization of highly complex electronic trading systems.

This role serves as a hands‑on technical authority for complex electronic trading systems across Rates and related asset classes, leading cross‑team initiatives by defining architecture, design patterns, and performance standards. You will design, develop, and support low‑latency trading applications—including pricing, RFQ, market making, order routing, and market‑data components—while maintaining end‑to‑end ownership across the full SDLC and production support.

The role requires translating complex trading requirements into robust technical solutions, ensuring platforms are resilient, observable, and compliant with enterprise risk standards, and partnering closely with product managers, traders, quants, platform engineering, and vendors, while mentoring engineers through technical leadership and influence.

This role defines and governs enterprise‑standard AI‑assisted engineering practices, including prompt‑driven development, automated testing, diagnostics, documentation, and developer‑productivity tooling, while architecting controlled LLM integrations such as MCP‑based services for development, observability, and automation. You will establish strong guardrails to ensure secure, explainable, auditable AI usage and partner closely with platform, security, risk, and compliance teams to evolve GenAI and agentic‑AI capabilities in alignment with Wells Fargo governance standards.

In this role, you will:

• Act as an advisor to leadership to develop or influence applications, network, information security, database, operating systems, or web technologies for highly complex business and technical needs across multiple groups.
• Lead the strategy and resolution of highly complex and unique challenges requiring in-depth evaluation across multiple areas or the enterprise, delivering solutions that are long-term, large-scale and require vision, creativity, innovation, advanced analytical and inductive thinking.
• Translate advanced technology experience, an in-depth knowledge of the organizations tactical and strategic business objectives, the enterprise technological environment, the organization structure, and strategic technological opportunities and requirements into technical engineering solutions.
• Provide vision, direction and expertise to leadership on implementing innovative and significant business solutions.
• Maintain knowledge of industry best practices and new technologies and recommends innovations that enhance operations or provide a competitive advantage to the organization.
• Strategically engage with all levels of professionals and managers across the enterprise and serve as an expert advisor to leadership.

Required Qualifications:

• Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education.
• Electronic trading experience within capital markets, with deep exposure to Rates or Fixed Income e‑trading platforms.
• Experience designing and building high‑performance, low‑latency trading systems, including pricing, RFQ/RFS, order management, market data, and execution workflows.
• Hands‑on experience with Java in performance‑critical systems (with exposure to Python and/or C++ as applicable).

Desired Qualifications:

• Deep experience with FIX protocol, ECN connectivity, market data feeds, and exchange/broker integrations.
• Proven ability to operate as an individual contributor technical lead, owning architecture and influencing multiple engineering teams.
• Strong experience partnering directly with traders, product teams, and business stakeholders to resolve complex production and performance issues.
• Expertise in low‑latency and real‑time system design, including JVM tuning, GC optimization, threading models, memory management, and performance profiling.
• Strong understanding of electronic market making algo trading, SOR/EMS platforms, and internalization models.
• Working knowledge of OMS, CLOB, and post‑trade processing flows.
• Familiarity with quantitative modeling concepts and analytics used in electronic trading.
• Experience with regression and performance test automation frameworks.
• Advanced knowledge of capital markets business processes and trade lifecycle.
• Strong understanding and practical application of Agile and DevOps practices.
• Experience integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) in enterprise environments, with emphasis on governance, traceability, and controlled usage.
• Familiarity with agentic AI workflow and Model Context Protocol (MCP)–based SDLC is a strong plus.

Job Expectations:

• This position offers a hybrid work schedule.
• This position is not eligible for Visa sponsorship.
• Relocation assistance is not available for this position.

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.

Summary Location: CITY OF LONDON, Type: Full time