Principal Software Engineer

NIQ is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Insurance Engineering team within Financial Services Technology. The team develops and supports customer-facing and internal applications used for insurance replacement-product identification, present-value calculations, client administration, reporting, and data integration. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. The Principal Software Engineer will set engineering direction, guide system design and modernization decisions, coordinate delivery across a distributed team, and remain directly involved in complex development, production support, and technical problem solving. The role will balance the stability of existing Insurance services with the gradual modernization of legacy applications and integration with shared Financial Services engineering platforms and practices. Who We Are Looking For You take ownership of technical outcomes and can lead through influence, sound judgment, and direct contribution. You can understand an existing system before proposing change, including its business workflows, data dependencies, operational constraints, and customer commitments. You communicate clearly with engineers, product and operations partners, and non-technical stakeholders. You can prioritize reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery speed based on business impact. You are comfortable working across modern and legacy technologies and can define a practical path between them. You can work effectively with globally distributed teams and coordinate work across time zones. You document decisions, system dependencies, support procedures, and technical risks so that knowledge is not concentrated in one person. Responsibilities Serve as the technical lead for Insurance Engineering, providing direction on architecture, implementation, delivery, and production support. Lead the design, development, maintenance, and modernization of Insurance applications, including Claim Manager, SpexAdmin, SpexOnline, reporting services, data connectors, and supporting APIs and services. Remain hands-on in software development, code review, debugging, root-cause analysis, performance tuning, and resolution of complex production issues. Own technical planning for application enhancements, platform maintenance, security remediation, dependency upgrades, deployment improvements, and technical debt reduction. Guide the evolution of legacy .NET, C#, AngularJS, Scala, F#, Perl, SQL Server, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch components toward maintainable, supported architectures where justified by business need. Define and review application architecture, service boundaries, API contracts, database usage, data flows, integration patterns, and non-functional requirements. Improve CI/CD, test automation, release validation, observability, secret management, vulnerability remediation, and operational readiness. Ensure customer-facing services and internal operational tools meet agreed expectations for availability, performance, security, data protection, and supportability. Partner with Insurance Services, Product, Operations, Infrastructure, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and Financial Services Engineering to translate business requirements into executable technical work. Lead technical discovery and dependency analysis for platform modernization, including the transition of legacy master-data dependencies and integration with shared Financial Services data and cloud platforms. Coordinate engineering delivery across the team, identify prerequisites and risks, remove technical blockers, and provide clear status on decisions, dependencies, and delivery commitments. Mentor engineers through design reviews, pair programming, code reviews, incident analysis, and practical knowledge sharing. Maintain current architecture diagrams, application and server inventories, deployment procedures, support runbooks, and decision records. Participate in incident, problem, a